The Daughter of the Hawk
Page 18
Not even the magic of the train and steamer could dim the luster of the memory of that voyage. At every half-hour of the journey Nina remembered some incident to chatter about to Miss Lamb: the collision with the barge at Suresnes, the time when Miss Lamb had to buy a spark-plug from a seemingly idiotic motor-accessory dealer at Dijon, and the historic occasion near Nevers when a drifting bit of rope twined itself round the propeller shaft, so that Dawkins had to hang head-downward over the stern with a wildly agitated Miss Lamb and a hysterical Nina holding on to his legs while he disentangled the frightful mess.
Nina was most desperately determined, by the time they reached home again, that next year would find them pushing for the Black Sea via the Rhine and the Danube, and that the year after that they would be on the Nile or the Volga. She regretted hourly the years that must pass before she was sixteen—that being the age limit she had set herself, without consulting either Dawkins or Miss Lamb, for remaining at Gilding High School before setting out for the Amazon and the Orinoco, real rivers, unmapped, untraveled, with the additional attractions of savage animals, hostile tribes and doubtful food supply.
In fact she was far more interested in the Rhine and the Danube than in the first stages of womanhood through which Miss Lamb was anxiously piloting her; these last were inevitable, and, to Nina, not very important. She did not realize what a change had suddenly come about in herself, although it was a huge surprise to Dawkins when he rejoined them after a fortnight’s absence. Much of the change had, indeed, occurred in that fortnight, the rest had passed unnoticed somehow during the French voyage and only dawned upon Dawkins, all at once, on his return.
Instead of the rather fragile child he was expecting to see, Dawkins saw, with a shock, that Nina was now an opening bud of womanhood. There was something a little different in the eyes and face—not much, and Nina would not have liked it had she been told so, but an undoubted change. And blending with the dainty boyish figure there was a suspicion, more than a slight suspicion, of bosom and hips. The little piquant change wrung Dawkins’ very vitals. He hated it and was charmed with it and was unsettled by it and tried to reconcile himself to it all in the same instant. It was change, and by this time Dawkins’ chief desire was stability. He dreaded what it portended, even while he could not perceive any alteration at all in Nina’s manner toward him and the rest of the world. He hated himself for the discovery that a man comes to love a budding woman in a different way from the way he loves a child. There were moments when he could not keep from his mind vague visualizations of the slight tender breasts beneath the white drill blouse, and he spurned himself savagely for visualizing them. He was like a monk in his desperate battling with the flesh.
The time might come when he could settle down to the new conditions, when he could accustom himself to Platonic, parental affection. But that time was not yet—not while the features of the Hawk, whom he had loved, and of the child-Nina whom he had loved, blended with those of the woman-Nina whom he grew instantly to love.
And that is the end of this story, for the rest of the history of Nina and of Dawkins has not yet been achieved. For Nina is still in the fifth form of Gilding High School for Girls and is still poring over maps of the Danube in preparation for next summer’s voyage, and Dawkins still spends successive days at the Manor Golf Club and Gilding Golf Club, trying to reduce his handicap from six to five, and at Mr. Gray’s East End Settlement trying to act as though charitable actions are natural to him.
We can not pry into the future, and if we could we would hardly dare to do so, for Dawkins’ future seems gray and sad and depressing however we examine it. We can only be sure of one thing: that Dawkins will be ready to make any sacrifice for Nina’s sake, and it seems as if that stern common sense of his will make the sacrifice pitifully severe. Maybe that stern common sense of his will keep him from marrying Nina and so courting disaster—a marriage of nearing fifty to nearing twenty, for doubtless Nina, before she has time to look much about her and to arrange her thoughts in mature fashion will be willing enough to marry her dear daddy should he ask her. There is even the faint comforting hope that the marriage should it take place would not be disastrous; that Dawkins’ tender loving-kindness and sound instinct would hold it together during the years which lie between fifty and senility.
And yet we can not bring ourselves to believe in this marriage; Dawkins is far too ready to sacrifice himself for Nina. He will hold back until the twenties come, and he will watch the young men come sidling round Nina—polished, moneyed young men who will call him “sir” and pay only the vaguest attention to him, poor old dodderer, while their eyes continually stray aside to Nina, and the inevitable moment will arise when Nina will cast aside her poor old daddy as heartlessly as any young woman in love ever does. Dawkins’ keen blue eyes, faded a little now, perhaps, will run minutely over the young man without his being aware of it, and will weigh him up, and he will decide that he is almost good enough for Nina. Then Dawkins will come down with a handsome settlement and his blessing, and Nina will leave him, almost without a thought, to the blue devils of loneliness and regret. He has never merited whatever good fortune has come to him, anyway.
A Note on the Author
Cecil Scott “C.S.” Forester, born in Cairo in August 1899, was the fifth and last child of George Foster Smith and Sarah Medhurst Troughton. After finishing school at Dulwich College he attended Guy’s Medical School but failed to finish the course, preferring to write than study. However, it was not until he was aged twenty-seven that he earned enough from his writing to live on.
During the Second World War, Forester moved to the United States where he met a young British intelligence officer named Roald Dahl, whom he encouraged to write about his experiences in the RAF.
Forester’s most notable works were the Horatio Hornblower series, which depicted a Royal Navy officer during the Napoleonic era, and The African Queen (filmed in 1951 by John Huston). His novels A Ship of the Line and Flying Colours were jointly awarded the 1938 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.
Discover books by C. S. Forester published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/CSForester
The Daughter of the Hawk
The Peacemaker
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First published in Great Britain 1928 by The Bobbs-Merrill Company
Copyright © 1928 C.S. Forester
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eISBN: 9781448211227
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