“If you come out,” said Mark, opening a long cupboard by the door and taking out a second overcoat, “you’ll put this on, won’t you? There’s a heavy dew falling.”
He was reassured by her returning gaiety, as she by his boyishness; and he thanked her by a tenderness in his voice which she took for the music of the spheres. He went up the steps into the cockpit. He had hauled the boom of the mainsail in amidships whilst they dined, and he now loosened the sheet and paid it out. But there was still no wind, and only the weight of the sail kept it outstretched over the sea. Between the open doors of the cabin he saw Mona busily clearing away the plates and the dishes, the cutlery and the glasses, into the little cuddy beyond; washing them; setting the crockery on its rims in the racks, the glasses in their stands, the knives and forks and spoons in their drawers; returning to the cabin; folding up the tablecloth, putting it away; taking sheets and blankets from lockers at the back of the settees and making up the beds. He noticed that though she moved without haste the work was very quickly done. He sat admiring the deftness of her movements. Viewed from where he sat with the tiller in the crook of his arm, even at that short distance Mona and the interior of the cabin were seen in miniature. Thewliss had the impression that he was looking on at some pleasantly homely scene in a little play.
“Yes,” he reflected, “I like that. I must marry one of these days.” His eyes went to Mona Lightfoot, as she now stood tall and slim with her back towards him, whilst with her arm gracefully lifted she raised a glass globe from a candle to blow the light out. “Yes, and before it’s too late...”
Thus he admonished himself to make his way in the world quickly, so that before age put a tarnish on his dazzling qualities he might pluck from some helpfully great family a wife with the low, broad white forehead and mysterious dark eyes of Mona there — yes, rather like Mona — very like Mona — in fact Mona born in a castle, aired in her perambulator under pergolas, and pruned and trimmed in the drawing rooms of Mayfair.
Mona put out the candles, slipped on the capacious overcoat and joined Mark Thewliss in the cockpit. The sickle of new moon had set and the stars had taken the sky by storm. All about the ship, infinite darkness and a hush which the girl thought it would have been sacrilege to break. Thewliss buttoned the coat close at her throat and, setting an arm about her, caught her against his breast. The air was warm. The red and green side-lights shone comfortably from the side rigging, and here and there a pathway of pale gold ran out across the sea to meet a planet. The magical holiday! Mona played with the fancy that the little ship itself was a star in space with Mark and herself for its only inhabitants, and two colours of light, green and red, to baffle and astound all the astronomers at their telescopes.
Thewliss looked steadily southwards and Mona, following the direction of his eyes, breathed a sigh. Out there the mirrored stars were trembling in the water. In a few moments a faint wind stirred the curls of her hair. The sail towering into the night flapped like a great bird’s white wing and the sea tinkled against the cutter’s planks.
Mona waited in suspense, but with the acquiescence which was the mark of her. Here was one of the fatalities which neither will nor effort could alter or direct. Either the breeze strengthened and turn by turn they sailed their ship to the Start, or this one enchanted night was given to her. She sat very still. The sound of water splashing into a glass died away; the great sail, its white shading upwards into black, towered spectral and shadowy against the sky. Darkness and silence once more embosomed the little cutter and its tenantry. They fell to talking in low voices, both of them with a fancy that a malevolent spirit might strike at them in jealousy if it discovered them floating upon the bespangled mirror of the sea in the perfection of the summer night.
“I should like to be sailing in the Pacific on a night like this,” said Mark.
“Could it be more wonderful out there than it is here?” Mona Lightfoot asked.
“So many big bright stars, they say,” he whispered, “we should never find our way amongst them.”
Then his voice changed.
“Look!”
A golden fragment slid down the sky, curving with a lightning swiftness, and vanished.
“There goes a world.”
“Not ours!” Mona cried in a low voice; and she breathed a prayer from her heart. “Not for a month—”
All the wonders that were marching out to greet her at each hour of her expedition — she could not spare one of them. They were to make the prelude to a fine, exacting, fruitful life at the best — at the worst they were to be woven into a deathless memory, so that she could lie at night in her darkened bedroom and in an instant sail out of Poole Harbour to the west. She must see the sickle of new moon round to a red disc and wane again and be blotted out. The last lightship on the edge of England must ring its bell within her hearing.
“Not till this month be passed!” she prayed, and her voice broke. Thewliss drew her close within his arm.
“Mona!”
She rubbed her cheek against the rough cloth of his coat, cool and damp with the dew.
“Mark!” and the name was whispered so low that only the movement of her lips told him that she had spoken his name. The new yachting cap tumbled off on to the floor of the cockpit.
“There goes more than a world,” said Mark.
She felt his lips upon her forehead. His arm slid up to her shoulders, his hand tilted her chin Her upturned face in the darkness was wan and grave and very tender. Mark kissed her on the lips.
“It is time,” he whispered.
There was an orison in the clasp of his arm, an answer in the quietude of her body. She let a few moments pass. Then she disengaged herself, rose and went down into the cabin, closing the doors behind her. Mark saw the light of the candles stream out through the side windows above the level of the deck for a little while. Then the candles were put out again and the doors opened from within.
The tide was running to the west. The green light of a ship steaming up Channel moved across in the distance. In that hush he could hear the pulsation of her screw with an extraordinary clearness. He made fast his tiller and, hooking back the doors, went into the cabin.
“Mona!”
He stooped over her bed. She was awake; her eyes shone in the darkness. Her arms closed about his neck. He felt her breath warm upon his cheek; and in the whisper of her voice he heard the loud cry of her young heart.
“Mark! My Mark!”
V. THE RING
“THE BUOY’S STRAIGHT ahead.”
“I see it, Mark.”
It was nine o’clock in the morning, the breeze from the north-east and the sea ripples of gold. The breeze, fresh and steady, had blown from that new quarter since six o’clock in the morning; and with the tide making under her keel, Sea Flower had raised Bury Head and left it behind and was now abreast of the Mewstone. That great rock, draped in the vivid emerald of its moss, shone like a jewel; and about its fin, serrated as any aiguille of Mont Blanc, the seabirds swooped and clustered and filled the air with their wailing and melancholy cries. Somewhere at hand, Mona understood, the Dart emptied its water into the sea, but she had to take the information on trust. For the Sea Flower was sailing past a curve of high cliffs, which to the eye ran in an unbroken sweep to the bold promontory of the Start.
But as the Mewstone dropped away behind the little ship’s quarter, the cliffs broke suddenly in the most unexpected and entrancing fashion. Mona had learnt by now not to let go the tiller and clap her hands. She contented herself with a gasp of delight. The door of the robbers’ cavern had rolled aside. She was a second All Baba who achieved her miracle without an Open Sesame. A narrow entrance of shining water appeared by magic between high, steep, darkly-wooded cliffs. An old castle on the western side guarded it. Within she saw white villas clinging amongst the trees and, far down, ships at their anchors and a little town.
“You must round the buoy,” Thewliss cried energetically from the bows. He had
just taken down the foresail and was stowing it in the sail locker. “The channel is west of the buoy,” and as Mona bore away he dropped his nautical airs and began to laugh. “As a matter of fact, with our light draught we could go in on either side of the buoy, but there’s nothing like being shipshape, is there?”
And now it was his turn to gasp — and hold his tongue. Mona was sitting on the upper side of the helm; and since the Sea Flower was on the starboard tack, it was her left hand which held the tiller. Upon the third finger of her left hand there was a plain wedding-ring. For a moment Mark Thewliss was really moved. It was by gratitude, he asserted, by Mona’s prevision. She had used a portion of her afternoon in London after the yachting cap had been bought to purchase this accessory to their expedition. She had thought of it, whereas he who should have thought of it had not.
“After all, I know the gossip of the little harbours. There never was a tea-party to match them,” he reflected. “Every little thing is noticed and passes from longshoreman to longshoreman and from yacht’s crew to yacht’s crew. The absence of a wedding-ring on Mona’s finger would be a wounding inconvenience, not to be exaggerated, of course. It would be forgotten very quickly since the pair of us is unknown. But in each harbour we should feel it — a mosquito bite. I should have thought of it.” He consoled himself with the sudden thought that even if he had thought of this device he would never have suggested it. No, it had to come from Mona herself, without prompting from him. And it had so come. Mark Thewliss was grateful.
“Yes, that’s all right,” he argued, meaning that he knew now why he had been so moved by the gleam of it on Mona’s hand, and recognised that there was justification for this trifle of emotion. But — but — in the secret heart of him he was not satisfied. He was once more, and again rather resentfully, conscious of a discomfort — a tiny sense of shame which he was very careful not to follow back to its cause and origin. He had an excuse. For the Sea Flower had just rounded the buoy and was making for the entrance.
“Keep her head on the two white beacons!” he cried, and he slipped the cover over the sail-locker and went aft. With the wind blowing from the northeast, more than one short tack had to be made before the long river front of Dartmouth was reached. They dropped their anchor above the ferry opposite to a deeply recessed bay; and it seemed to Mona that night that all the owls in the world were calling to her from those high, thickly wooded slopes.
The summer favoured them. They ran the next day to Plymouth, idled through a long Sunday in Fowey, slept for a night under the over-arching trees of Helford River, beat through one long day round the Lizard to Penzance, and starting thence at daybreak with what is called a soldier’s breeze, reached out past Land’s End into the Atlantic and towards nightfall dropped anchor opposite St. Mary’s in the islands of Scilly.
In that enchanted archipelago, with its semitropical gardens and its touch of the exotic in the mere aspect of its inhabitants, they took their ease. They hired rooms of which the windows overlooked the Sound, and with a local boatman to pilot them amongst the intricacy of its rocks and shoals they explored the lonely waterways; bathing from beaches of dazzlingly white hour-glass sand crowned with thickets of yellow gorse, fishing for pollock, picnicking on the roofs of old ruined forts which had once been the last strongholds of King Charles.
They ate the lotus, Mona throwing behind her even the knowledge of all that hung for her upon her enterprise, Mark Thewliss expanding into a boyhood which grew more and more nautical with every morning. Every rope was a hawser, every anchor a kedge, soldiers were “grabbies,” landsmen did not count enough to have a generic name at all. Food, of course, was duff; and bells, not clocks, gave the time of day. The small intimate jokes which Mona had reckoned as the very salt of companionship were tossed back and forth between them. It became a creed that if Mona’s yachting cap were lost they were doomed. There were words which Thewliss pronounced with too great a nicety for Mona’s ears, for instance, the “p” in “psychic” and “pneumonia;” and elaborate conversations were invented by her leading up to a point when he, unaware of the trap into which he was being led, pronounced the ridiculed word. Mona had phrases too which led at once to a Socratic dialogue of the severest precision. If she could only be made to say “That just shows—” she was subjected at once to an examination of the most searching kind as to what it showed until the beach rang with their laughter. And amidst all their foolishness and sanity the golden wedding-ring shone upon Mona’s finger.
It was she who unwittingly broke the spell. They were taking their luncheon on the convex roof of an old fort on the outermost edge of Tresco. At their feet the punt was drawn up on the sand, and their pilot ate his sandwiches by the side of it. Out in the fairway of the creek the Sea Flower swung at its kedge with its mainsail scandalised Over all spread a sky without a cloud. Mona Lightfoot turned her face towards the west where on the quietest day the Atlantic rolled and broke with a flash of sunlit surf.
“Here we are, actually at the end of England,” she said.
“No.”
Mark Thewliss lit his pipe and turned to her with a smile.
“Since you have seen where England begins, you ought to see where it ends, oughtn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“To-morrow, then. If there’s a wind. We oughtn’t to wait. We’re in September and half-way through the month. Some time in September the weather’ll break. We ought to have got back to the mainland before it does.”
Mona caught her breath, and for a little while the earth was emptied of its joy, the day grew dark.
“Yes,” she agreed in a dull and reticent voice. The moon had rounded to the full. It hung over those islands on these warm nights, a huge disc of a colour golden-brown, drowning the stars, drenching the seas with light; and even in the morning, white as a wraith, it sought to hold the sky against the sun. The holiday was half over. From now on a shutter would close, hiding each night a little more of the night’s radiance. Would it close over her heart, too, obliterating, not for a month, but for the rest of her life, the wondrous new world of joy and beauty and flowers into which a lily pond at the back of High Holborn had been the gateway?
“Yes.”
And the next day, beyond Roseveare and Rosevean, those flat, outer islands where in the coarse salt grass the sea-birds make their nests, she saw over the bowsprit of the Sea Flower a tall, slim pillar standing alone amidst mist and spray. The Bishop Lighthouse. They anchored at the foot of it. But the Atlantic always thunders and frets against that rock. From the set-off forty feet above their heads, a cable attached to a windlass was flung out, caught by Thewliss and his pilot and passed through a block. A rough stirrup had been fashioned in the rope. Into this Mona set her foot; and whilst she clung to the cable with her hands at the level of her breast, she was swung outwards and upwards above the leap of the waves.
Just for a moment the question flashed through her mind: “Shall I let go? Shall I end all now when life is at its best — before I know whether the shutter will close on me or not?” It would be easy. Nothing could save her if she fell into that surging mass of water between the cutter and the precipitous rock. It would be quick. But the temptation passed. That particular form of cowardice was not in her nature to commit. But when she stood at last on the narrow stone set-off, there was the look in her face which those who have survived great illnesses so long retain.
Thewliss followed. They climbed to the great lantern and were told how on winter days green seas had smashed the glass and made the tower vibrate like a spring. It was two o’clock in the afternoon when, with a wind astern, they started back.
“That’s the end of England,” said Mark, and both of them fell to silence. They were inward bound now. Mona looked backwards to the high column and forwards to the low mass of the islands. She must fix their aspect in her mind, lest never in her life again she should come this way.
On Mark Thewliss, too, the influence of the eastward voyage was strong, but in
a different way. He, the merest lodger in the fields of asphodel, was returning to the true activities of his life, invigorated, eager, his brain rich with new plans of advancement. He said:
“I never told you, Mona, of the mess I made last winter at Mardyke and Campion’s, did I?”
“No.”
“I promised to.”
“Yes.”
She was standing up in the cockpit, her arms upon the cabin roof, looking out with a concentrated gaze over the waste of sea. A little more than a fortnight back she had known nothing of it. Its currents and races, the set of its tides, its splendours by day, its mystical refulgence by night, its myriad voices from the angry thunder at the Bishop’s Rock to the liquid tinkle at a wooded anchorage, above all, its friendly solitudes — all these exquisite marvels of the created world had been hidden away from her. She had known a parade, a bathing machine, pierrots in a booth, and a beach cluttered with noise and people. No wonder she answered with an absent voice and turned away reluctantly. The sea was calling to her troubled, anxious heart as a mother calls to her child.
“Yes,” she said. “Tell me!”
“You had better go into the cabin and slip on an oilskin before you come aft. We are certain to get some of these waves hopping over the edge of the counter.”
Mona came aft a few minutes later with the oilskin buttoned about her throat and a sou’-wester on her head. She seated herself by the side of Mark Thewliss and whilst he steered the Sea Flower so that she presented her stern square to each threatening wave, he told his story.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 590