“After that downpour last night she’ll probably be half full!” she said, gloomily.
I had overlooked this, and we picked up our belongings and went out across the sand pit to the head of the gully, where we had landed and dragged the boat clear of the tide line. When we climbed the dune that looked down on the shallow cleft we stopped and gazed at one another with horror. The gully was empty and the dinghy was gone!
We ran shouting to one another along the entire beach as far as the old wreck. There was no sign of the boat until we reached the extreme southeastern corner of the island and there, left behind by the tide, was one of the floor boards. Apart from that there was nothing but driftwood, cork floats and ragged whiskers of ruined lobster pots. We made a complete tour of the coast in the deepening twilight but there was no sign of the boat. She must have been washed out of the gully by rain and carried away by the ebb tide.
I knew what I must do and I set to work at once. In the last glimmer of light we rooted among the overhang of the dunes for dry or semidry kindling and driftwood. When we had gathered several armfuls we dragged it to the westerly point of the island, directly facing Whinmouth. Then, with dismal solemnity, we carried out the remains of our fire in the saucepan and set the pile alight, heaping the brushwood up until we had a good, strong blaze. I knew that old Tom Yelland, the pilot, would want to know who was tending a fire on Nun’s Island the evening following a heavy storm, and it was not long before we saw the light of the pilot boat swing out into the estuary and head out to sea to catch the easterly swell and bear down toward us.
About half an hour passed before the lights bobbed inshore and during that interval we said very little. Finally Diana stood up and tossed back her hair.
“Let me do the talking, Jan,” she said. “I’m better at it than you.”
“He’ll take us back to Whinmouth first,” I told her, “and he’ll put two and two together at once, so it’s no good pitching him an unlikely yarn.”
“Listen, Jan,” she said, “we’ve only got a few more minutes and after that it might be months—years even, before we even see one another again.”
Her warning bored into me like a drill and involuntarily I began to protest.
“It’s true,” she went on, relentlessly, “so listen, Jan, and don’t interrupt! Promise?”
“I promise, Di.”
“Well, then,” she said, speaking very levelly, “first I want to say thank you for everything, for coming here and for looking after me so wonderfully. Nobody could have done it so well, not even the real Jan, who was much heavier and stupider than you and really a bit of a bore when he wasn’t in action!”
I managed a wry grin at this. It had crossed my mind more than once in the past that Diana would have found Jan Ridd infuriating, notwithstanding his masterful masculinity and heroic mold.
“Secondly, I want you to know that I’m more in love with you than ever and always will be, no matter what happens from now on. Anyone else would seem terribly feeble after you, Jan and even if they had your kind of hemanship they wouldn’t understand me nearly so well as you do, or be anything like so patient with my impatience, if you see what I mean. As soon as all this blows over I’ll be packed off somewhere, if not Switzerland then somewhere else a long way away, but it can’t be forever, because when I’m twenty-one I can do as I jolly well like and I will, don’t you fret! I’ll come back to you and find you wherever you are and we’ll be together, for always. We’ll find another Sennacharib maybe and we’ll pick up where we left off, doing all the things we like doing and being the sort of people we want to be, d’you understand?”
“Yes, Di, I understand and I feel the same way about everything!”
“I’m glad,” Diana went on, “because there’s one other thing and that is, we’ve both got to stop struggling for a bit. Things are too strong for us at the moment and we’ve got to save our strength and drift with the tide like our poor old boat, waiting until we’re in a position to go our own way in spite of all the opposition. That means that you mustn’t make a scene when we get back, Jan, and you must just sit quiet and let them say anything, do anything, and treat the whole thing as if it was just a silly sort of a prank and hadn’t any real meaning behind it. That’s very important, because if they go on thinking that, they’ll let up on us sooner or later, and forget about it and that’ll be our chance, d’you see?”
It was very sound reasoning for a girl her age and temperament and I compared it, to its advantage, with the sour resentment and defiance that had been smoldering inside me for a long time now. Any kind of honest declaration on our part would be received with anger and contempt, not only on the part of her parents but on the part of people like Uncle Reuben and Aunt Thirza, who would be sure to share Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton’s scorn for a love affair between people as young and as socially remote as Diana and myself. Before I could comment on this, however, Tom Yelland hailed us from the shallows. I picked up our sopping bundles and turned toward the beach.
“Just a minute,” said Diana. “I want to kiss you, Jan!”
I dropped my bundles and put my arms around her. My lips tasted the salt on her cheek and she shivered as I murmured her name.
Tom hailed again and Diana whispered, “Darling Jan, darling, darling Jan!” as I stood back and called to Tom. Then, without another word, we crossed the hillock to the mouth of the gully and waded out to the boat.
Chapter Seven
UNCLE REUBEN was the hero of that dismal week. I had always known that beneath his outward crust of holier-than-thou respectability was the core of a social rebel, but until now I had been inclined to share his brother Mark’s opinion that, in many ways, Reuben was a hypocrite, that he thundered against others’ shortcomings from pulpit and political platform because he had always lacked the courage to expose himself to a man’s ordinary temptations. I was wrong and Mark was wrong. Uncle Reuben was a man who drew his inner strength of character from the Old Testament, who really did worship at the altar of self-denial and personal integrity, who believed not only in a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay but in a handshake instead of the contract, and in the preservation, at almost any cost, of human dignity in terms of work, truth and resistance to the Devil. He was gruff, intolerant, and sometimes harsh in his judgments but he was no hypocrite; he had more moral courage than anyone I ever met.
In the days that followed our surrender I came to know and respect Reuben in a way that the lobster-helmeted troopers of Cromwell must have revered their Bible-thumping leader in the field. By some standards, I suppose, he was a narrow-minded old stick-in-the-mud but he was also a man, and a good deal more of one than anyone else involved in the repercussions of our flight.
There had been more fuss about our disappearance than I had anticipated. Diana’s note about getting a job in a city had fooled nobody and the police were informed of her absence that same night. Extensive inquiries were made and these soon resulted in a report that we had been seen together at the regatta dance on the previous Friday. This at once involved me, and when it was known that I too had left town at short notice, it did not need a trained detective to unravel the basic facts of our long association. Even Keeper Croker was called in to describe how we first met and poor old Drip, the governess, faced recriminations that came near to giving her a nervous breakdown.
There were one or two stormy interviews between Uncle Reuben and Aunt Thirza on the one hand, and Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton and her solicitors on the other, but the upshot of these was that the hunt veered off on a false scent, for it was assumed that we had run away to try to get married at Gretna Green, in imitation of another teen-age couple about whom the papers had had plenty to say a month or so before.
As Diana had prophesied, no one thought of looking nearer at hand, and by the third day, when some of the details had leaked out to the press, Heronslea was picketed by local linage men and so-called special correspondents. These were given a very cavalier reception by Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutt
on, who always considered that a free press was the principal drawback of democracy. The result was inevitable. The more she clamped down on news, the wilder and more improbable were the stories printed, and when Diana had been found and packed off home in a taxi by Tom Yelland and the local police, the Heronslea keepers had a full-time task keeping reporters at bay.
We had our share of the press siege but Uncle Reuben was an old hand at dealing with newspapermen and they did not bother us nearly as much; partly, I suppose, because the Heronslea background and Mr. Gayelorde-Sutton’s notoriety in the City made Diana a more tempting target.
It all died down after a few days. The story was killed by an earthquake in Japan, then by Germany’s abrupt exit from the League of Nations, and later by Diana’s heavy cold, which kept her in bed and helped her mother to prevent the press from interviewing her until the story was stone cold.
I stayed indoors most of the time and Uncle Reuben did my work. I was glad of Aunt Thirza that week, for she reserved all her natural belligerence for callers but behaved toward me with extraordinary tenderness—far more, I felt, than I had deserved of her.
Talking to her over our meals (Uncle Luke was already insulated by silent contemplation of the migratory habits of martins and swifts), I realized how wise Diana had been to urge me to encourage the adult world to look upon the whole episode as a teen-age prank.
“Giddon, did ’ee ever zee such a fuss over a couple o’ chits takin’ it into their ades to go’n live on a desert island?” Thirza snorted, heaping my plate as though I had a dinosaur’s capacity for vegetables. “They papermen want something to do, I reckon, writin’ all that ole nonsense about something as happens yer every time kids go near the zea!”
The romantic or “sex” angle of the situation entirely escaped her. Diana and I might have been a pair of city toddlers who had succumbed to the magic of blue water and golden sands and sailed away from the harbor to play pirates.
“T’iz all on account o’ they Zuttons”—Aunt Thirza would never concede Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton her double-barreled name—“havin’ too much money!” she declared. “If they ’ad to turn to, an’ work vor it, zame as most of us, they’d smack her bottom an’ think no more of it, so there! Yer, ’ave zum more tatties, boy,” she added. “You couldn’t have had much to feed ’ee up on that ole rock out there—bliddy silly plaace to go this sort of weather!”
Uncle Reuben, of course, took a much more serious view of the matter. The sheer extravagance of our gesture outraged his common sense and I think my willing participation in such a wild adventure permanently lowered his opinion of me as a future editor of the Whinmouth & District Observer. What worried him even more, however, was the vague implication, in one of the Sunday newspapers, that we had enjoyed a bizarre honeymoon on the island, and it was this aspect of it that led him to call around and demand to talk to me in private, closing the door on a muttering Thirza and a completely bewildered Brother Luke.
It was the first time we had been alone since I returned, and his brooding presence embarrassed me. When he tried to speak of what was in his mind, however, he became the more embarrassed of the two and finally I had to help him out, for he could never quite bring himself to adroit that a child made its appearance via its mother’s vagina, or still less that this rather shameful fact was preceded by an even more undignified one in which men played a degrading part.
“If you’re wondering what really happened while we were alone out there, you can stop worrying, Uncle,” I told him, and was glad to see that my words brought instant comfort to him. “It wasn’t that kind of love at all, although I daresay lots of folk around here will always think it was. The whole thing would never have happened if Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton hadn’t decided to send Diana away to a finishing school in Switzerland.”
This inclined him more to our side. Despite his ceaseless League of Nations work and Free Trade theories, he was a fanatical isolationist. Deep down he hated and distrusted all foreigners, even the blameless Swiss.
“Why on earth do people like her want to send their daughters to foreign schools?” he growled. “Aren’t there good enough schools over here, where she can learn to behave herself properly?”
“It’s all part of the setup,” I told him, and explained a little of Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton’s plans for Diana’s future. He shook his head, despairingly.
“Arrant snobbery! That’s all it is!” he muttered. “Too many of those people about nowadays and it’s where the Tories get their money from, I imagine. How can you want to go about with a girl like that, John? They aren’t our sort at all!”
“Diana is,” I said, stoutly. “She hates it as much as you do, and hated it enough to run away from it all.”
“But why did you have to get involved? You aren’t being sent to a finishing school in Switzerland.”
I was tempted to try to explain to him how I felt about Diana, and how she felt about me. It occurred to me that he might be able to understand a little of our love for Sennacharib and the glorious avenues of freedom it offered us, but in the end I thought better of it and simply mumbled:
“We get on, Uncle Reuben. We’ve grown very fond of one another after all this time and it seemed such a shame to spoil it all!”
He sighed and stood up, awkwardly patting my shoulder. There was a good deal more genuine affection in the gesture than he was able to convey.
“Very well, John,” he said, “let’s forget it all and start afresh. Come back to work tomorrow, and I daresay it’ll all blow over in a day or so. Most of these things do, even in places like Whinmouth.”
He was wrong in one sense. Whinmouth would have forgotten it almost at once, but the townsfolk were by no means as deeply involved as was Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton. The day I went back to work we had a visit from her, and it was then that I had an opportunity of estimating Uncle Reuben’s full stature.
2.
I thought I knew Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton as well as anyone by this time, but I was nevertheless amazed by the viciousness of her attack. The moment she saw me she jabbed a trembling finger at me and squealed: “Thet’s him! Thet’s the boy! What’s he doing here? He ought to be in a reformatory, thet’s where he ought to be!”
I was badly shaken but stood my ground, reminding myself of Diana’s final injunctions about this interview and how it should be handled.
Uncle Reuben, however, was disinclined to be hectored in his own office. He not only disliked Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton personally but detested everything that she stood for, socially and politically.
“If you’ve come here for an apology for John’s part in this silly business you’ll get one, Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton!” he said, stolidly removing the pipe from his mouth and laying it down on his cluttered desk. “On the other hand, if you’ve simply called to make trouble, and scream idiotic accusations at everybody, I’ll have you removed, if necessary by the police!”
Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton opened and closed her mouth twice. Her color mounted so rapidly, and her hands fluttered so violently, that I thought for a moment she was going to have a seizure. When at last she did manage to speak, her voice shot into a high, unnatural key and she had to try again, after a few rapid intakes of tobacco-laden air. This made her cough and we waited, with studied politeness, until she had quite recovered. Then Uncle Reuben nodded gravely at me and I took my cue.
“I’m very sorry Diana caused you so much worry,” I mumbled, flushing. “I don’t think she meant to and I’m sure I didn’t!”
As an apology it left a good deal to be desired and Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton gobbled it up like an insignificant crumb, glaring hard at me, her slightly poppy, green eyes almost starting from their sockets. I had always thought of her as a handsome woman but she did not look handsome now; she looked almost pathetic, like a badly spoiled child who had been goaded into a hysterical temper. Even she realized this, I think, for in the next few moments she made a great effort to calm herself.
“I could hev put you in prison for th
is,” she said. “And I would, too, if Aim’ald hadn’t been so … so utterly wicked about it!”
I wondered what this meant and made a guess at it; on Diana’s return, no doubt, and after studying the newspapers, Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton had probably told Diana that she intended prosecuting me on some obscure charge, possibly abduction, or something of that nature. Diana must have countered this by saying that if her mother did anything so stupid she herself would come into court on my behalf. Uncle Reuben, however, cut short my speculations by once more reducing the wretched woman to the point of self-strangulation.
“You couldn’t do any such thing, Mrs. Sutton,” he said—and I noted that he had taken a leaf from Aunt Thirza’s book and dropped the “Gayelorde” in order to reduce his opponent to size. “John certainly did wrong in helping your daughter to run away, and also in not telling you about it when she did, but as the whole thing was your daughter’s idea and not his, you could only charge him with being an accessory, and they’d laugh you out of court on that! Believe me, madam, I’ve a long experience in these matters. If you really want to bring a charge go right ahead and do it!”
Mrs. Gayelorde-Sutton then changed her tactics. Suddenly she began to snivel and her sniffs did nothing to restore her dignity. Uncle Reuben continued to contemplate her gravely until finally she blew her nose into a very expensive-looking handkerchief and wailed:
“It was a terrible thing to do! Terrible! No nice boy would do such a thing, I’m sure.” When she said this her vowel-torturing accent disappeared. It was the first time I had ever heard her speak like anybody else and it somehow made her a little more human. Uncle Reuben, however, was unmoved by her tears.
“I’m not sure about that,” he said heavily, “but if it is so, then no nice girl would do it either.”
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