The roar and clatter was all behind them; they were no longer battered and cuffed; they were enclosed in the silence of a lagoon. But they were not out of the Race. The surf through which they had struggled was but its edge and rich embroidery. The sea swept at them now in flat sheets, marked out from each other in accidental patterns of arcs and straight lines. It gave Mona Lightfoot the impression of a crazy pavement moving forward under the cutter with an irresistible velocity. The sheets were of a pale green in colour and glimmered with a viscous sheen. They hissed and rustled like silk against silk in a lady’s dress; and as they raced by, bubbles like little bright beads continually formed and burst upon their surface and tiny whirlpools span and disappeared, so that Mona no longer thought of crazy pavements in a vast garden, but in a more homely fashion of water on the boil in some fabulous cauldron.
She climbed out of the cockpit, and holding on to a stay stretched herself out upon the deck, so that she could see far down into the depths of this green water at once violent and smooth. There was something curiously relentless in its onsweep; it ran so fast that she grew dizzy watching it. It seemed to her that the Sea Flower must be travelling with the speed of some magical ship like the Flying Dutchman. She glanced towards the shore to take her bearings for the first time since the Sea Flower had plunged into the Race, and cried out in her amazement. The round white lighthouse with the chocolate band was still ahead of them, almost as far ahead as when she had last looked at it. But it was a tiny thing now, a coloured toy set up on a distant coast; so far had the Race pushed the small cutter out to sea.
“I told you we couldn’t hit the Bill even if we tried,” Thewliss shouted at her. “But the tide’s beginning to ebb. We shall make headway in a minute.”
He was sitting crouched up by the tiller, holding the long arm with a grip of iron, keeping the cutter to her course against eddy and current, and measuring by the shore-marks each foot gained with an enjoyment which Mona had never seen in his face before.
Gradually the lighthouse dropped behind them; the great bluff of cliff at the far edge of the Race moved forward into view; the roar of water became audible again. For a few moments the Sea Flower tossed again in a jumble of surf and then slipped out into the shining freedom of the Bay. Over the high yellow wall of the Chesil Beach a town came into view on their right hand.
“What’s that place?” Mona asked.
“Weymouth.”
She could hardly believe her eyes. That was the town — just there, just across that high barrier of pebbles — from which they had sailed so long ago in the cool of the grey morning. Then she saw the lofty down open out far back between Portland and the cliffs of the Bay; a long straight road run like a chalk line to a solitary tree on the down’s crest; the slender pillar set up to Nelson’s captain; and the famous White Horseman riding away eternally and covering even less distance than a little cutter in the Race.
“Breakfast,” cried Thewliss.
By the time when it was eaten and cleared away, there was nothing visible but sky and sea and the dark brow of England’s Gibraltar astern of them. Mona took the tiller whilst Thewliss set himself to the never completed task of burnishing and polishing; and when she looked astern again the last of Portland had vanished into the September haze.
“I have waited for this all the morning,” she whispered, gazing about her with eyes shining as though she looked upon some miraculous vision. “Do you know that I have never been out of sight of land before?”
“We should see Bury Head if we were a little higher out of the water,” said Mark Thewliss, still the practical sailor with a chart of the coastline in his head.
But Mona took no notice of his words, for she did not hear them. She was absorbed heart and brain in this new and entrancing experience; the great bowl of blue sky, the wide expanse of shining sea and the little exquisite ship alone in this glorious immensity.
“I may never see this again in all my life,” she said in a low voice which had, even to the man who heard her, an appealing sadness. A wondrous holiday — yes. A holiday to be noted and stored up, so that every moment might at some later day be unwrapped from its overlay of time and minister as a solace like a jewel of soft deep fire. But ever present also was the recognition that in all her years to come not one moment of it, not even a moment to match it might once recur. Thewliss was constrained to an uneasy silence. In the girl’s frank, ungrudging acceptance of the limitations which were likely to subdue the whole of her life to something little, he discovered a bravery quite foreign to himself, he suspected a nobility in which he had no share. He was conscious of discomfort. He was a little ashamed.
Throughout that morning and the earlier hours of the afternoon the wind blew steadily from the south-east. They took their spells at the tiller. Now far out some big steamer would trail a ribbon of black smoke across the sky. Now close at hand for Mona’s enchantment a school of porpoises would rise from the depths and escort the Sea Flower on her way, crossing and recrossing in the clear water beneath her keel, leaping up to shake the spray from a black glistening fin, then cart-wheeling with a splash of water like urchins let loose from a class. But towards four o’clock the wind fell light — at five the great boom of the mainsail swung inboard and swung out with a great rattle of blocks, and the little ship shivered. As far as the eye could reach there was not a flaw upon the water.
“A — little — check,” said Thewliss with a curious intonation half mincing, half guttural. “We shall get the wind again before nightfall. Meanwhile it’s — a little check.”
He was misquoting the catch-phrase from a popular comedy of those days. Mona, sitting upon the roof of the cabin and swinging her legs in the cockpit, laughed and took up his allusion.
“Digby Grant in the ‘Two Roses,’” she cried. “When he pays back the sums he has borrowed from his humble friends;” and she too tried to imitate the great protagonist who had made Digby Grant his own. “A — little — cheque.”
“Do you know I once — once? twenty times — had more than half a mind to kick chemistry out of the door and take a header on to the stage?”
“You? You, Mark?” and with a joyousness he did not understand, she pressed for a reason.
“Why? Why?”
But Mark Thewliss was in full flight. He had only an audience of one, it was true, but that one was very fit and satisfying. Her eyes so shone with so starry a pleasure, her laughter hit full-throated the exact moment when laughter should round off the phrase.
Speech after speech from the “Two Roses.” Then followed extracts from “The Corsican Brothers,” noble sentiments from “Charles I” and all the ironical humilities of Shylock. And each delivery was uttered with the same curious intonation, and was accompanied with the strange gurgling growls one might expect to hear from a wounded panther. Nor did gestures fail to point the words; but they were unusual gestures, tossings of the head, pawing of feet upon the floor of the cockpit, sudden outreachings of the arms and hands with the long sensitive fingers quivering like springs. And all the time Mona, swinging her legs over the cockpit, applauded enraptured, and cried:
“Why? Why, Mark, did you want to go on to the stage?”
Mark was flattered by her eagerness, he did not bother to seek a reason for it. He recited. The failure of the wind, the sea, even the little boat — all were forgotten. “Why, Mark, why?” Oh, there was a reason for her question. It sprang from a heart made over subtle by a passionate and almost despairing love.
* * * * *
Those were the great days of Henry Irving. He had triumphed alike over his deficiencies and the swarm of his belittlers. He had made attributes of his weak voice and his grotesque gestures. He had decorated his plays with splendour and with artistry. He lit them at will to the glare of noonday or the tender atmosphere of night. And over all lay the dominant magic of his own personality. He made of the Lyceum Theatre a temple, with himself its arch, unquestioned priest. He held a place in the social scheme unocc
upied since Garrick died. He was the great interpreter. The reticence of his life and the delicate authority of his face crowned him with an aura of romance. Stories ran the town of his generous heart and caustic tongue. He was of a Florentine magnificence. He was almost inevitably the idol of middle-class youth. Admiring parents gathered their friends into suburban drawing-rooms to hear their sons recite Shakespeare in the Irving manner. Every normal youth in office or factory wanted to go on the stage and dignify a theatre with a replica of Irving — and Mark Thewliss like the rest.
That was the hidden thought which so charmed her, which drove her on, as she sat dangling her slim legs over the cockpit, to ask for scenes from “The Cup,” for speeches of Cardinal Wolsey and for the arguments of tortured Hamlet. Mark Thewliss was on the same plane as the others of his years and class, none of whom would add another Irving to decorate the age, all of whom would in due course mate with their like, share with them their due assignment of joys and sorrows and ambitions and move on arm in arm with them to such achievement as that Santa Claus, the future, kept hidden away for them in his sack.
“More! More!” she cried, clasping her hands together between her knees and leaning forward with eyes so eager. “‘Richard III’ now! Please! ‘Now is the winter of our discontent’” — she remembered a Saturday evening when she had stood for three hours under the low roof of the pit entrance of the Lyceum— “Oh, Mark, you do it divinely!”
Mona followed the sound old rule. If you are going in for flattery, lay it on with a trowel. Mona had her reward, since reward she considered it. Mark Thewliss expanded, glowed, hunched his shoulders, projected into his not very malleable features such a medley of venom and cunning as would justify his being hanged on sight — and recited. He gave Mona “Now is the winter of our discontent” — oh, and much more. He wooed Anne, plotted with Tyrrel the murder of the Princes in the Tower, started up from the vision of his assassinated victims and met his death on Bosworth Field.
Meanwhile the sun went down. Far away in the north-west the long bluff of Bury Head, now visible, ran out like a fortress wall into the Bay. Above it the sky had the tender colour of an amethyst. A flaw of wind crept from the south, ruffling and blackening the water.
“Let it hold and we can anchor at Torquay tonight,” said Mark, and as the breeze reached the cutter he paid out his mainsail sheet and bore away to the north.
“But we shan’t reach the harbour in time for dinner,” he added. “And I’m glad, Mona. You’re a cook to match my appetite, and that’s no small praise, I can tell you.”
Mona jumped down from her perch and stood for a moment looking forward. The rose of the sunset was fading from Bury Head. It looked to her a thousand miles away, a rock reef somehow wedged in the sky. Her eyes swept the horizon. Here and there a gull floated on outstretched wings or swooped to the sea. The slight breeze was dying away. The cutter with its tenants was alone.
Mona fried a couple of dabs; grilled a couple of lamb chops with tomatoes; baked some potatoes in their jackets; set out on the table a Cheshire cheese, some fruit and a bottle of Moselle; opened a tin of sardines as a hors d’couvre, and cried out:
“All ready!”
Mark Thewliss fixed the tiller in its appropriate clutch and stepped down into the cabin, whilst Mona lighted the candles in the sockets on the walls and enclosed them in their round glass funnels. They dined gaily; Mona still possessed by the enchanting notion that she had sitting next to her on the settee no great man in obscurity, no chrysalis soon to spread gorgeous wings, but just a grub like herself, an adorable grub but a permanent grub — her man; Mark, for his part, aware of a well-being hitherto unknown to him. It was produced by the whiteness of the tablecloth, the shining metal of the cutlery, the good cooking, all the daintiness that a woman contributes to a meal, and by the presence of this attentive, lively and lovely companion at his side.
“I used to spread a napkin on the green baize last year and take a cut from a cold ham with a loaf of bread and some pickles. Mona, this is the most wonderful holiday. May it be like this to the end!”
He lifted his glass and drank to her. She waited. She wanted to hear him add:
“And next year may we repeat it!”
But he did not. The wish, so easy of fulfilment, never indeed occurred to him. Mona set down her glass.
“I’ll make some coffee.”
Whilst she cleared the table, Mark uncovered a locker in the bows, brought up his port and starboard lamps, lit them and mounted them on their wooden stands in the rigging. When Mona came back from the kitchen into the cabin she saw him wrapped in a long thick rough blue overcoat.
“We shan’t get to any harbour to-night, Mona,” he said in a serious voice. “The wind has fallen altogether. We have the tide with us. I have set our course for the Start Point. We ought to get into Dartmouth to-morrow morning.”
Mona nodded her head, whilst the blood mounted into her neck and face. Her eyes looked straight at him, charged with a mystery which quite baffled him.
She did not speak.
He drank his coffee in an embarrassment.
“I didn’t mean...” he said. “With the wind as it was this morning we looked like crossing the West Bay in good time.”
“I want you to tell me something,” she asked.
“Yes?”
“Why did you want to go on the stage?”
Mona had come back to her first urgent question. Mark Thewliss gazed at her in surprise. The question seemed trivial, even childish, at this hour and in this place.
The cabin doors stood open, held back upon their hooks. Mark glanced through the opening. The last of the daylight had long since gone. A moon three days old was spreading a silver radiance across the world. Though Mark’s eyes saw only the cockpit yellow in the streaming candlelight, the butt of the tiller held fast in a notch of its gleaming rack, and the sheets of the mainsail sloping upwards from the traveller towards the boom, he had a picture in his mind of the quiet floor of the sea empty from rim to rim except for this little ship, where a young man and a young woman stood face to face in a tiny lighted cabin. The question was trivial — yes. But he looked back to Mona. She was not trivial. She was not childish. A smile made her mouth tender, her big dark eyes watched him steadily; and both the smile and the grave eyes were a riddle to him and a mystery.
“I’ll tell you.”
Mark Thewliss sat down upon the settee and filled his pipe.
“It hadn’t anything to do with art. Oh, no!” He spoke exculpating himself hastily and vigorously from any suspicion that he was concerned with any leaning so open to derision. “But when I noticed the extraordinary hush in a theatre full of people, when I saw those people of all degrees, from the man with the muffler round his throat in the gallery, to the fine disdainful lady in the stalls, leaning forward so that their eyes might not miss a movement, nor their ears an intonation — people lost to the world, helpless under a spell — I used to wonder whether anything else could give to any man such a sensation of sheer power as that spellbound house must give to the actor on the stage.”
He laughed a little brokenly and moistened his lips with his tongue. He betrayed himself at that moment. He laid naked the violence of his ambition and its weakness. Power, not as a lever, but as a sensation. Power not as a means to some greatly-planned achievement but as achievement itself, self-sufficient, an emperor’s diadem. He savoured it now. The look of his face was voluptuous.
Gradually, however, his mood changed. Delight was succeeded by uneasiness. It took him a minute or two before he realised that his uneasiness was due to an extraordinary stillness in the cabin. Mona stood as if turned to stone. Did she find something to censure in his confession of faith, he wondered — and wondered rather resentfully. But he did not look at her. If he had he would have seen that the smile had passed from her lips, but that her eyes still watched him with their tremendous mystery and quietude. But he did not; and suddenly, to his amazement and discomfort, he was
absurdly conscious of a suspicion that of the two of them, the girl, in spite of — nay, perhaps because of — her clear recognition of what could be and could not be, and the uncomplaining submission which sprang from it, had the higher pride, even the nobler spirit.
He could not endure so wounding an idea. He flushed red and broke out fretfully:
“Did you ever read Disraeli, Mona?”
“No.”
“I’d have him taught in schools, if I had my way. A long chalk more useful than Xenophon. He’s the guide for young men. There’s a novel called ‘Endymion.’ Listen to this, Mona. It’s an extract from it — a text to be printed in big black letters on a white background and hung up in one’s bedroom where one’s eyes must see it, the moment they opened in the morning. Listen!”
And he recited, no longer with any mimicry of Henry Irving, but in the voice of one weighing out slowly the final words of human wisdom:
“Power and power alone should be your absorbing object, and all the accidents and incidents of life should only be considered with reference to that main result.”
And now he did lift his eyes to Mona’s face, and lo! once more she was smiling. Mark’s first surprising answer to her question had struck her down, a blow from an iron mace. It was the formulation by him of all the fears, the heart-sinkings, the sudden forebodings which had robbed her of her peace and kept her aching — more than the formulation of them. It set upon them the seals of truth. Even at that moment she was clear-eyed and clove to the very heart of his meaning with a superb instinct.
“For real power,” she said to herself. “For the power to do some great long-planned thing, a mate like me, one with him, might help — yes, in the end might be of service. But for the sensation of power, the luxury of continual evidences of power — a great house, famous men at your table, deference and the doffing of caps — not one man in a million would look to me for help there.”
But Mark had not left the matter so. He had gone on to quote Disraeli with a curiously naïve and boastful petulance — just like a schoolboy captured by some splashy, grandiloquent sentence to be found somewhere in any notable book. She loved his plea that Disraeli should supersede Xenophon. She felt that it was absolutely right, not because she knew anything of the respective merits or suitabilities of those two authors, but because it revealed in him once more to her the adorable boy for whom every woman looks in the man she loves, but no woman more ardently than this lovely gambler on the Sea Flower.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 589