“Dear Jan,” she said, sleepily. “Good husband! Kiss me good night!”
I did so very willingly, my love for her sweeping over me like a strong, warm flood.
“Everything is going to be all right about us in the end, Di!” I told her and believed it, deep in my heart.
Her arms wound around me and she kissed me a dozen times.
“Darling, darling Jan!” she whispered. “You’re quite the nicest thing that’s ever happened to me!”
I made up my own bed on the side farthest from the fireplace but although I was tired out with all the excitement and exertion it was a long time before I dropped off to sleep. I lay awake listening to the mournful notes of the bell buoy, and to Diana’s slow, regular breathing, wondering what would be the end of it all and feeling humble and helpless, as well as immeasurably grateful for the opportunity to share the same world as Emerald Diana Gayelorde-Sutton, of Heronslea, Devon and Palmerston Crescent, W.2.
It was a bright day when I awoke and Diana’s place was empty. I jumped up and looked wildly around, terrified that she had been spirited away during the night, but almost at once I noticed that the fire had been made up and the kettle was on. A moment later she came clattering into the cabin in slacks and sweater, carrying a large armful of driftwood.
“You were so efficient and come-come-little-womany last night that I thought it was my turn to show off,” she said, kissing me lightly. “I’ve found the spring. It’s over on the Whinmouth beach, so I think you had better refill the can before people are about. It’s nearly seven already!”
We used the can for washing and I prowled cautiously around the spur of sand to refill at the spring. The distance from this side of the island to Whinmouth was too great for us to be spotted with the naked eye but there were always people on the quays and jetty with telescopes and binoculars, so I decided to take no chances.
We tried to make some salty little cakes with the flour I had brought but they were very unappetizing, so we agreed to ration ourselves with the bread. Diana opened a can of corned beef and we fried slices, exchanging many jokes about one another’s cooking abilities. After breakfast we had a swim, then we made more tea and set the phonograph going.
“I wish you’d brought more records,” I chaffed her. “We’re going to get frightfully sick of ‘Three Little Maids’ and ‘There Lived a King’ by the time we’re rescued. My favorite isn’t here, anyway. It’s The Pirates of Penzance, the one the amateurs did in the spring.”
This led to an amiable discussion on Gilbert and Sullivan, and thence to musical comedies, films and books. During the time we were alone on the island we explored one another’s literary and dramatic tastes very thoroughly, for we spent a great deal of our time inside the shanty, being nervous of daylight movement on the western or northern sides of the island.
I remember that first morning we talked a great deal about desert island books and I was rather surprised to discover that her acquaintance with them was slight. I told her the story of Coral Island and we discussed Robinson Crusoe at length, for she was vaguely familiar with this one. She knew nothing, however, about Treasure Island or The Blue Lagoon, and was very intrigued by Emmeline’s production of a baby without the benefit of Marie Stopes, who was one of Diana’s heroines.
I had not been all that impressed by Blue Lagoon but I know long passages of Stevenson’s classic by heart and recited them with relish. We speculated a good deal on how the vast treasure came to be buried on the island and then moved on easily to poetry, in which field she was far more advanced that I. My acquaintance with verse at that time was limited to ballads like “The Armada” and Kipling’s jingles, but she was very scornful about my taste.
“That isn’t poetry at all!” she exclaimed. “Those are just rhymes, like longer Jack Horners and Little Miss Muffets! Real poetry is quite different. Miss Thorpe says it’s ‘emotion remembered in tranquillity’—you know, lovely, lovely groups of words, like Tennyson’s Princess.”
My knowledge of Tennyson was confined to “The Brook,” Morte d’Arthur and The Lady of Shalott so I asked her if she could quote me some of her favorite pieces.
“My favorite piece of Tennyson is the first and last verse of the song from The Princess,” she said, and quoted:
“Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.
“Dear as remember’d kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign’d
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no morel”
Only a few days ago, after an interval of more than twenty years, I came across these verses and they still retained enough tired magic to restore to me a detailed memory of Diana, sitting with her long legs coiled under her, her small, earnest face frowning with the strain of recollection as she recited them against the background of the rough-hewn logs that formed the fireplace wall of Crusoe Jack’s cabin. Then, without effort on my part, the sounds and scents and talks of our idyl came back to me as fresh and gay as growing daffodils, and I remembered how she had run on about poetry, and opened up a new field of cadences that have since brought joy and color into my heaviest hours.
“Miss Thorpe, our English Litt. teacher at school,” she told me, “is the only mistress who really understands people our age. Some teachers have a calling, like parsons,” she added, “and Thorpey is one of them. She’s introduced us to a lot of modern poets, nearly all killed in the war, poor dears, and her favorite, and mine too, is Alan Seager, the American boy. I like everything he wrote because … well, because nothing that happened to him could take the sparkle away!”
“What did happen to him?” I asked, curiously.
She told me about Alan Seager, how he came to France a few years before the war, and how, when Paris was threatened by the Germans, decided that he was under an obligation to defend the city that had been his inspiration; how he served through three years of trench warfare and died, obscurely, at the barricade he had visualized in the best known of his verses. When she was discussing something that had captured her imagination she acted quite shamelessly, and as she quoted “Rendezvous with Death” I could see Alan Seager penning the lines among the debris of a shattered Champagne village.
“Do you know any more of that kind of stuff?” I demanded, eagerly. She was flattered by my enthusiasm and went on to quote her favorite verse from Seager, a little poem inspired by the memory of a prewar love. Later on, much later on, I found and learned the verses myself:
“Out of the past’s remote, delirious abysses
Shine forth as once you shone—beloved head,
Laid back in ecstasy between our blinding kisses,
Transfigured with the bliss of being so coveted.
“And my sick arms will part, and though hot fever sear it,
My mouth will curve again with the old, tender flame,
And darkness will come down, still finding in my spirit
The dream of your brief love, and on my lips your name.”
There was magic in the way she recited those lines, the kind of magic, I think, that Seager himself would have understood so readily, and as she said them it was not the ghosts of the Negro seaman who hovered over Crusoe Jack’s shabby cabin, but the benign ghost of someone to whom the ecstasy of first love was still a strong, bright flame, strong enough and bright enough to light a candle in the hearts of two romantic young idiots and persuade them that it was enough to light them down the years.
Toward evening, when there was not much chance of being observed on the south side of the island, we roamed the beach and knoll and caught some flatfish in a pool left by the tide. We took them home and fried them, telling each o
ther that they were delicious, and after our evening record recital we talked again until it was late, neither of us caring to admit that, as the hours passed, we were progressively conscious of the enormity of our situation and terrified of its outcome.
So passed three idyllic days, days spent in cautious sunbathing, talking, preparing picnic meals, gathering driftwood for the fire and a good deal of innocent love-making of the kind that makes sweaty nonsense of the lovemaking to which film audiences have been conditioned since the advent of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Paramount.
Such kisses as we exchanged, and they were not as many as we might have exchanged in that solitude, were spontaneously given and received, and all our caresses were gentle and playful. I don’t know why this should be so; we were young, eager, and very well pleased with one another. There was nobody to surprise us or embarrass us, as young lovers are so tiresomely surprised, and so easily embarrassed. We had outgrown the shyness of displaying a mutual desire for affectionate exchanges; we acknowledged, with delight, that we belonged one to the other, and therefore had access to all but the innermost chamber of one another’s thoughts and feelings. Yet we were not lovers in the real sense of the word, not then, not when we could have been and with such complete innocence.
I think we held back for different reasons. On her part she treasured the magic web we had spun, month by month and day by day, since our first meeting in the larch wood. She treasured it, yet was aware of its extreme delicacy. She wanted leisure to enjoy its beauty before moving on to explore its intricacies, for there was a kind of timelessness about this period in our lives and although both of us were acutely aware that the immediate future was perilously uncertain, we were yet able to look beyond into the years when we would have outgrown the prohibitions of the present and could contemplate them with laughter and nostalgia.
I, for my part, had another, darker reason for holding back when her lips touched mine and she murmured my name over and over again like an incantation. I wanted to emerge from this strange, sweet interlude free of guilt I wanted to be ready to challenge her parents and her gilded background without having to explain my deepest feelings for Diana to people who could never measure them in terms of human emotion. I wanted to stand upright and meet their scorn, not to kneel and have it poured over me like scoldings leveled at a willful child. I wanted, even if I had to wait for years and years, to claim Diana as a right, not to beg for her, as one beseeching an impossible favor. This much her trust and declaration had done for me and they brought with them a current of steady triumph, as if the sap of manhood had been pumped into me by my unlooked-for responsibilities. I was no longer afraid of the Gayelorde-Suttons and their money. To a degree Diana’s underwater kiss had banished that fear, come what may, threaten who would.
On the fourth night I was awakened by a frightful clamor through which I could hear my name being called, plaintively and urgently.
It was pitch dark and during the night a southwesterly gale had whipped up and was howling across the island like an army of dervishes, piling the sea on the beach in a long thunder of sound.
As I fought the tug of sleep there came a particularly vicious gust that ripped the tarpaulin from the rear of the hut, exposing us to a downpour of slanting rain, cold and mercilessly direct, as though the storm-tossed clouds had singled out our particular corner of the coast for a thorough drenching.
I scrambled up and called back to Diana, torn between the desire to reassure her and the need to save the tarpaulin before it billowed across the island and was lost.
Diana won; we collided in the blustering darkness and instantly her arms went around me.
“Jan, oh Jan, you’re there! What’s happened? It’s so dark and awful …!”
I made a great effort and pulled myself together.
“It’s all right, Di,” I soothed, stroking her streaming hair, “it’s just a storm and the wind has ripped the tarpaulin off. Wait, I’ll take the light and get it!”
“Don’t leave me alone,” she wailed. “I can’t stay here alone, Jan!”
“All right, then you come too … where’s the damned light … we’ve got to find the light!”
We groped around the hut, stumbling over items of kit and finally locating the bull’s-eye near the fireplace. Its weak beam revealed a sorry state of affairs. When we had turned in, the cabin was a warm, cozy haven; now it was a half-flooded ruin, with seventy-mile-an-hour gusts sucking at what remained of its roof and torrents of rain streaming down the ramshackle timber walls.
I took her by the hand and together we staggered out and around behind the hut, flashing the beam from side to side in the hope of spotting the tarpaulin.
The wind was so strong out here that it hammered us like a rain of punches and we had difficulty in remaining on our feet. The loose sand of the hillocks came at us like a volley of darts and the roar of the breakers, fifty yards below us at highwater mark, was deafening. We groped our way, drenched and half-blinded, across the sandhills. On the far side of the island, where the rocks sloped away, the force of the wind abated somewhat, enabling us to reach the inshore tide mark, and here we at last stumbled upon the tarpaulin, soaked and tattered, held in a crevice between two rocks. Somehow we dragged it back to the rear of the shack, where we crouched under the lee of the chimney breast, doing what we could to shelter ourselves under the miserable remnant of tarpaulin. Soon Diana’s teeth began to chatter and I thought about trying to light the fire and trying somehow to make a hot drink. Then I remembered that all the driftwood would be wet anyway, in this kind of chaos how could I find kindling and strike matches?
There was nothing to do but wait for dawn, and it was a long time coming.
We lay there, pressed together, sharing what warmth remained in our bodies, until the wind began to drop, the gusts grew more widely spaced and, at last, a gray, reluctant light showed in the sky over Nun’s Head.
Then, with infinite difficulty, we stood and spread the tarpaulin over one corner of the cabin, weighting it down with the largest stones we could find. It wasn’t much of a shelter and the downpour had given place to a heavy, persistent drizzle, but it was a good deal better than remaining in the open. When it was quite light I scouted around for some paper and sticks, I found a small pile of driftwood that might be coaxed into a fire, but there was nothing to get it going with. By this time, however, Diana had rallied somewhat.
“Use the phonograph records,” she suggested. “They’re waxy and they’ve been under cover in the lid.”
I found the records and broke them into jagged pieces. After one or two failures we soon had a frail fire going, Diana collecting likely pieces of damp wood, while I slopped along the desolate beach to refill the water can, upset in our groping during the night.
In the half hour the kettle took to boil we surveyed the ruins. Our rugs were soaked and there was no promise of sunshine to dry them. Our food stores, such as they were, were reduced to a soggy paste and the only things left to eat were Diana’s two remaining cans of fruit. Neither of us much fancied a breakfast of cold peaches or pineapple, but the tea warmed us and gave us sufficient heart to discuss the situation.
“We’ll have to pack it in, Di,” I told her. “We can’t stay here in this weather without food and shelter. I daresay we could dry out the rugs somehow and maybe patch up the cabin, but suppose we do? By tomorrow we’ll be famished.”
She said nothing for a moment or two, her small face pinched and strained with the ordeal of the night, her wet hair still plastered in glorious disorder across her cheeks. She sat quite still, hugging her knees and staring into the slow, smoky fire. At last she said:
“Right! Then I’ll go back and give myself up, providing we do it separately and providing you aren’t involved, Jan.”
“How can we do that?” I asked. “It’s broad daylight now and we’re sure to be spotted going across, or landing.”
“Then we shall have to put up with it until dark,” she said, firmly. “Then we
’ll pack up and row across to Nun’s Bay. You can drop me there and go on home yourself. I’ll get in touch somehow. We’ll think up a plan before we actually part.”
I turned this over in my mind and it seemed about the best course open to us. We dried wood, built up the fire, and decided to take the risk of the smoke being seen, for we could not face the prospect of staying there, wet through and shivering, without the cheering glow and frequent draughts of hot tea.
The weather settled in drear and hopeless, so much so that at midday I was doubtful about making a dinghy trip across open water, but later on, although the rain persisted, the wind dropped altogether and the sea was no more than choppy.
Bad weather has a devastating effect on romance. All the sparkle had died from our island adventure and the rock itself had been changed by dripping skies and chilling southwesterly winds from a remote Eden to a dismal place of exile. We were depressed, too, by the inevitability of a prolonged separation. Perhaps, I thought, we had been away just long enough to persuade Diana’s father to cancel her Swiss plans, but whether this was so or not, it was quite certain that the escapade would lead to a much stricter watch being kept upon her and from now on every meeting would necessitate complicated planning and considerable risks of discovery.
We worked out a kind of letter post, inspired, I seem to remember, by an old print Diana possessed, depicting a girl in frills and flounces making her way through a tangled wood to a letter box in a hollow tree. I agreed to call at the “box” every night and pick up any messages, leaving my replies. Even a night and a day under seeping skies could not extinguish Diana’s enthusiasm for exploring the secret passages of romance.
Toward dusk the rain ceased, although the sky remained overcast and whitecaps flecked the surface of the bay. Diana said we ought to take the things down to the boat and bale it out before we pulled her down the beach.
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