by James Hilton
“Have you ever slept out?”
“Oh, often.”
“You seem to have done all kinds of things.”
“Many kinds of things, perhaps.”
“I wish you’d tell some of your adventures.”
“I might, some time.”
Yet he continually put it off. Partly, of course, because it was always easier to do so; Mrs. Consett’s chatter was a strong current that could be swum against, but it was far less trouble to relax and let it carry one along. And partly, too, because he felt a curious reluctance to break the tranquillity of those simple days, and what tranquillity or simplicity could remain after he had told his entire story?
He had, in fact, few chances of talking to the girl alone, and he could not, he felt, tell her the final secret—her own identity—at any other time.
One night, after dinner, someone brought a gramophone into the tiled hall and put on dance records. The girl asked him if he danced and he replied, smiling: “I’m afraid I don’t—I never learned, and I’m too old now.” She said: “I’ll teach you, then,” and as other couples were by that time moving from their seats, he replied, with sudden decision: “Will you? All right.” He found it easy; she was a good pilot, and he himself had a sure sense of rhythm. “As if you were too old to learn,” she whispered, reproachfully, as they drifted in amidst the lamp-lit shadows. “I don’t think you’re really too old for anything.”
“Although I’m nearly three times your own age?”
“That doesn’t matter. You don’t feel old, do you? And if anyone saw you when you were making a fire for a picnic, they’d think you were only a boy.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I was watching you this afternoon. You were enjoying it, weren’t you?”
“Absolutely, I admit.”
“So was I. I don’t think I’ve ever got to know anybody so quickly as I have you. It seems rather an awful thing to say, but sometimes—sometimes I wish mother wasn’t quite so—so everywhere—and always; she’s a dear, but she does chatter terribly, doesn’t she?”
“Just as well, perhaps, because I’m not much of a talker myself.”
“Neither am I, yet I’d rather like to give ourselves a chance. By the way, were you once a rubber planter out in the Malay States?”
“Sumatra, it was. But how did you know?”
“Oh, mother seems to have been finding out all about you. She happened to see an article in the London Times, and thought it must be you, from the name and initials. Then someone else told her—some people staying here, but I think they’ve gone now—that you’d been a planter out there and had made heaps of money.”
“It depends how much you mean by heaps.”
She laughed. “Personally, I’m not very curious, but mother seems to think you’re a millionaire travelling incognito, or something of that sort.”
He laughed also. “You can contradict the rumour,” he assured leer.
They went on dancing. They danced, in fact, with hardly a pause until nearly midnight, and when they finally rejoined Mrs. Consett he said, with eyes and cheeks glowing: “Your daughter is a most charming teacher. I hope we haven’t been allowing the lesson to last too long?”
“Oh, not at all—not at all.” Indeed, she seemed quite pleased.
He was tired that night when he went to bed, but it was the sort of tiredness to be expected after a day on the mountains and an evening of fox- trots. Curiously, in a way, he felt much better since he had begun the more strenuous life of Roone’s; it seemed to tire him far less to scramble up a mountain in search of fuel for a picnic-fire than to take leisurely strolls along city pavements.
The girl and he had more time together during the second week; there were occasions when Mrs. Consett professed fatigue and said she would write letters in the lounge while they, if they cared, took a walk. Roone’s was growing emptier; the eight months’ season of slack business was approaching and the first gales of autumn had already laid bare the trees in the woods. As an offset to the general exodus of visitors, a light cruiser came to anchor in Carrigole Bay for a few days’ visit. Most of the officers and men carne ashore to Roone’s; bluejackets swarmed into the public bar, while the hall and the long verandah terraces were filled with shouting and laughing naval officers. Every night they kept up their merriment to a late hour, and most of the day a group of them hung about the counter in the hall, chatting and joking with the Roones.
One morning Fothergill and the girl made the ascent of the Baragh, a steep, cone-shaped peak that rose a thousand feet at the back of the hotel. An hour of scrambling through heather brought them to the summit, whence could be seen the roofs of Carrigole and the long bay stretching westward into the sunlit sea.
NOW, he felt, as he sat on a rough stone with the sweep of sea and mountain all around him and the girl seated on another stone somewhat below,—now was just his chance. He could talk without interruption; he could begin at the beginning and tell all that was to be told.
Yet he didn’t even begin to tell. Another thought carne to him—that in all the world she was probably the only person he would ever meet who had ever known Daly—the sole surviving contact with all in his own life that had mattered most. And that dark passion of his, subdued for years, spilled over now in a little tender flood of affection for the girl.
Suddenly she said: “Do you remember I told you I sometimes had dreams that might have something to do with the time before I left Russia?”
He nodded.
“I had a dream of that sort last night. Too queer to be remembered, really, but the queerest part was that you were mixed up in it somehow.”
“I was?”
“Yes. We seemed to be going somewhere all the time—just one place after another—and at night we slept out in the open and used hot stones for water-bottles.” She laughed. “Isn’t it curious the way everything gets mixed up in dreams?”
The chance to tell her was again full on him, yet once again he forbore. He was still wrestling with memories of those old and epic days. He said, abruptly: “Are you happy in America? What do you do there? Tell me the kind of life you have.”
She looked amused. “I rather thought mother had told you everything you ever wanted to hear about our home life. As a matter of fact, we really do have a good time and get on splendidly together. We play a little bridge and tennis (though we’re both very bad), and we just have money enough to travel now and again and go to theatres and have friends to stay with us. I shall have to earn my own living, of course, for which I’m rather glad—I think it’s a mistake to do nothing but idle about and wait to be married by somebody.”
“Don’t you wish you’d been born rich, or high up in the world—a princess, say?”
“I wouldn’t mind if I’d been born rich, though I don’t suppose it would have made me any happier. And as for being a princess, when I feel romantic I sometimes try to kid myself that I am one—after all, nobody knows who I really am, do they?”
“I suppose not.”
“Though I daresay I wouldn’t really like it if I were. It must be very tiresome having to be important all the time. It would stop me from doing things like this, wouldn’t it?”
“Like this?”
“Yes. Scrambling up a mountain with you.”
He laughed—a sudden almost boyish laugh that startled the mountain silences. “Yes, you’re right. You’re happier as you are, no doubt.”
“I know I am. Oh, it has been such fun, travelling all over Europe ever since nearly a year ago, and the strange thing is, it all somehow seems to have been leading up to this. I mean this—here—now—just this.” She looked at him quickly and then stared far across the distance to the furthest horizon. “I like these mountains ever so much better than the Swiss ones, don’t you? I suppose it’s heresy to say so, but the Alps rather remind me of wedding-cake.”
And all the time and all the way down as they descended he was thinking of something else—of gilded salons an
d baroque antechambers, of consulates and embassies and chancelleries, of faded uniforms and tarnished orders, of intrigues and plottings and counter-plottings, of Paris cafés where Russian émigrés passed their days on a treadmill of futile anticipation, of Riviera hotels where the very waiters were princes and expected extra tips for so being, of dark and secret assassinations, of frontiers stiff with bayonets, of men in Moscow council-rooms ruthless, logical, and aware. That madly spinning world lay so close, and it was in his power to thrust her into the very vortex of it.
That night he took out of a sealed envelope certain curiously-marked papers. They were twelve years old; time and a fumigating oven had considerably faded them. He looked them through and then replaced them in the envelope. It was late, past midnight; the sailors had returned to their ship; even the Roones had gone to bed, and the lamps in the corridor were all out. He groped his way downstairs and found the drawing-room. There were the remains of a fire just faintly red in the grate; he knelt on the hearth-rug and fanned the embers till they glowed into flame. Then he placed the envelope on the top and watched it burn with all its contents. He waited till the last inch was turned to ashes and he could break and scatter them with the poker. Then he went back to his room and to bed.
But he did not sleep too well. If one problem had been settled, another remained; if he had not traced her in order to tell her who she was, why had he traced her at all? What need was there to stay at Roone’s any longer? And so, bewitching and insidious, came again the memory of the past; she was a shadow, an echo, reminding him that he was still young, and that the Harley Street man might have made a mistake. And the idea came to him that he might tell her some day, not about her own identity, which did not matter, but about himself and Daly.
The next morning began a chaotic interlude of travel; he wired to his London lawyer and the two arranged a half-way meeting at the railway hotel at Fishguard. The dignified elderly solicitor, obviously flustered by such hectic arrangements, scratched away for an hour in a private sitting-room; then Fothergill signed; and two hotel servants acted as witnesses and were suitably rewarded. The lawyer saw his client off on the Rosslare boat and parted from him full of misgivings. “It is not for me to offer criticism, Mr. Fothergill,” he said, accepting a drink in the saloon before the gangways were lowered, “but I do hope you have given all this your most careful consideration.” Fothergill assured him that he had, and added: “Anyhow, I hope I’m not going to die just yet—it’s only a precaution.” To which the lawyer replied: “I must say I think you’re looking very much better than when I saw you in London,” and Fothergill answered: “My dear chap, I really don’t think I ever felt better in my life. It’s the Irish climate—it seems to suit me.”
He was at Roone’s again by the afternoon of the next day, with Mrs. Consett immensely curious about his lightning dash to England. “Business,” he told her, and she was satisfactorily impressed; her idea of the successful business man was perfectly in accord with such fantastic journeys on mysterious errands.
Back at Roone’s he yielded again to the spell of magic possibility. Could he tell her about their earlier meeting when she was but a child; could he thus make fast to his own life this new and charming fragrance that might otherwise fade away?
So he perplexed himself, but that Saturday night as he saw her talking to a young naval sub-lieutenant he came to sudden decision. He saw her smiling at the pink-checked and handsome boy; he heard their laughter together; then they danced, and all at once, as he watched them, he felt old again and knew that he was old; and when Mrs. Consett began her usual chatter, he felt: We are a couple of old folks, watching the youngsters amuse themselves…
But half an hour later she came up to him, having left her partner, and said: “Don’t you want to dance tonight, Mr. Fothergill? I suppose you’re tired after the journey?” And he was up in a moment, ready to whirl through the world with her, old or young.
She said, as they danced: “That was a nice boy, if he wasn’t so silly.”
“I thought he looked a very attractive young fellow.”
“Yes—but silly. I suppose most girls like it and I’m the exception. I never could get on very well with boys of that age.”
“That age, indeed? I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s half a dozen years older than you.”
“Yes, I know—it’s strange, isn’t it? Perhaps the silliness is in me, after all.”
“In you?”
“Why not? Probably I’m old for my years. I’ve a sort of theory that I aged a good deal before I was six and that now I’m anything between thirty and forty.”
“That would put you nearer me.”
“Yes, wouldn’t it?”
Her calm, friendly eyes were looking up at him, and he had to exert every atom of will-power to prevent himself from yielding to the call of so rich a memory. His brain reeled and eddied; he began to speak, but found his voice so grotesque and uncertain that he broke off and tried to fix himself into some kind of temporary coherence; he heard her saying: “I don’t think you’re dancing very well to-night—you look as if your mind’s on something else all the time.”
“As a matter of fact, it just is.”
“Shall we stop, then? I don’t mind. Perhaps you feel tired?”
“I never felt less tired in my life. What I’d just like now is to go out and climb the Baragh.”
“Really? Do you mean it—really?”
He hadn’t at first, but he did then, suddenly. “Yes,” he said.
“Well, we could, couldn’t we? It’s bright moonlight and we know the way. It’s quite early—we should be back before the others begin clearing off to bed. I love doing odd things that most people would think quite mad.”
They slipped out through the verandah and began, hatless and coatless, the steep scramble through the woods, drenched with dew, and then up the rough, boulder-strewn borcen to the summit. They climbed too swiftly and breathlessly for speech, and all the way he was dizzily making up his mind for all the things he would say when they reached the topmost ridge. He imagined himself telling her: “Dear child, you are all that means anything in my life, and I want to tell you how and why—I want you to know how I missed my way in life, over and over again, yet found in the end something that was worth it all. You see, I want us always to be friends—great friends—you and I, not just as if we were chance travellers and had taken to each other. Much more than that. And it’s all so strange that I want you to try to understand.” And other confessions equally wild and enchanting. But when lie stood finally on that moonlit peak, with the sky a blue-black sea all around him, he could not think of anything to say at all. She stood so still and close to him, thrilling with rapture at the view, pointing down excitedly to the tiny winking lights of the cruiser, and then swinging round to peer into the silver dimness of the valley on the other side. “I shall never, never forget this as long as I live,” she whispered. “It’s far more wonderful than in the day-time when we climbed before.”
Then suddenly he realised why, or perhaps one reason why, he was not speaking. He was in pain. He felt as if a bar of white-hot steel were bending round his body and being tightened. Yet he hardly felt the pain, even though he knew it was there; it was as if the moonlight and the thoughts that swam in his mind were anaesthetising him. He opened his mouth and tried to speak, but could only hear himself gasping; and lie felt, beyond the knowledge of pain, an impotent fury with his body for spoiling such a moment. He smiled a twisted smile; he had been too venturesome, too defiant; he had climbed too fast. And all at once, just then, the thought came to him: Supposing I were to drop dead, up here—poor child, what a shock it would be for her, and what a lot of damned unpleasant fuss for her afterward…
“You are tired,” she said, staring at him intently. “Shall we go down?”
He nodded slowly and hoped she did not see the tears that were filling his eyes.
They began the descent, and after a few yards she took his arm and hel
ped him over the rough places. Half-way down he felt better; the pain was beginning to leave him. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“Sorry? For what? I enjoyed it ever so much, but it tired you, I could see—we mustn’t do such mad things again.”
“Except that I like mace things just as much as you do.”
She smiled, and he smiled back, and with her arm still linked in his he felt a marvellous happiness enveloping him, especially now that the pain was subsiding with every second.
“I’m not so bad for my age,” he added. “I suppose I oughtn’t to expect to be able to skip up and down mountains like an eighteen-year-old.”
“Your age?” she said quietly. “I never think of it, or of mine either. What does it matter?”
He laughed, then; he was so happy; and now that the pain had all gone he could believe it had been no more than a fit of breathlessness after the climb—a warning, no doubt, that he must avoid such strenuous risks in future. His only big regret was that he had missed the chance of telling her what had been in his mind, but it was too late now—the lights of the hotel were already glimmering through the trees. As they entered along the verandah he said: “I really am sorry for being such an old crock—sorry on my own account, anyway, because I’d rather wanted to have a particular talk with you about something.”
“Had you? And you’d stage-managed it for the top of a mountain in moonlight—how thrilling! But it will do somewhere else, surely?”
He laughed. “Of course. The question is when rather than where.”
“Why not to-morrow morning? We could go out on the harbour in the motor-boat—mother wouldn’t come with us—she hates sailing.”
“Good idea. That’ll do fine.”
“Directly after Mass, then. I think they’ll be having it in the hotel to-morrow—I heard Roone saying something about it. That’ll save the walk down to the village and we can have a longer time on the water.”
“Splendid.”
“And I’m so thrilled to wonder what you have to tell me.”