She looked about her. At the end of the creek, the little town of Kingsbridge ran up in a line into an angle of dark trees. A small boat was tacking across the estuary to the mark of the old lime-kiln. Opposite to her the tranquil creek to Southbourne narrowed between high curving fields, where the hay still lay, and coppices of thick trees. She wanted to engrave that quiet scene upon her memory, since she was never likely to look on it again. But there was a mist of tears before her eyes and her lips shook.
“Mona! Mona!”
She stooped watching with great concentration a small round tin spinning down on the tide.
“Yes,” she answered.
Mark Thewliss was at her side before she looked up. Even then she dared not look as high as his face.
“I was wondering...The punt will be finished this morning.”
Mona nodded.
“You’ll want to get back at once. You ought to, I think.”
“We lose a few days of our holiday.”
“What does that matter?”
The magical holiday had lost all its magic. The sooner it came to an end now, the better.
“I ought to write and post a letter to William Mardyke. Then we might pick up the punt and sail round the Start this afternoon, ready to take the West Bay in the morning.”
On a slope of stone at the boat-builder’s yard, an old whiskered man was finishing his work upon the punt.
“It’s all ready now,” he said, and he slid it down into the water and replaced its cushions and sculls and fitted on the rudder. “I don’t think as she’ll give you any trouble. But if any of them nails start, you’ll just have to hammer them in again. I’ll give you my mallet as a wedding-present,” and with a friendly chuckle he put the mallet in the boat and shoved her off. Mona never saw the man again, never knew more of his name than the initial “M” burnt into the wood, and within five minutes the trifling incident had passed for many years from her memory.
They anchored that night in the Dart, but nearer the entrance than before so that they might make an early start in the morning. Mark Thewliss was uneasy. There was very little of the moon left to see, the shutter had moved so far across the face of it, and that little was seen through a vapour like thin smoke. The wind, too, was shifting. “When it goes round against the sun at this time of the year,” he said, “you have got to watch it.”
He went down into the cabin and got out his Norrie.
“Dartmouth’s a curious place. Going west from it you ought to start four hours after high tide; going east, two hours before.”
He looked up his tide tables.
“High tide’s at nine. So we’ll start at seven.”
Mona slept restlessly through the early part of the night and heavily ‘towards morning. She was only awakened by the clatter of preparation upon deck. She slipped on an overcoat and ran out to find Mark taking a couple of reefs in his main sail.
“We shall have bad weather coming up behind us,” he said. “We ought, however, to blow across the bay before the worst of it reaches us.” He paused in his work to look about him. “There’s always the train, of course. What do you say? I shouldn’t be surprised to see the west cone hoisted at any moment.”
“What would you do if you were alone?” Mona asked.
“I should go out at seven o’clock,” he replied with a laugh, which had in it a thrill of deep enjoyment. “The Sea Flower wasn’t built for a tea-party in the Solent. If the seas get too heavy we can heave to, and she’ll ride out the gale like a duck.”
“I’ll get breakfast ready,” said Mona.
It was in her mind that she did not care what happened on the passage across the West Bay. For now there was not left even as much of her holiday moon as that slender sickle which had shone down when, ages and ages ago, they had first sailed from Poole. The shutter had moved across it until not one gilded edge was left. Even after the Sea Flower was reaching to the entrance of the river, the smooth water and the high hills holding off the squalls, misled her; so that she made light of the wrack of clouds tearing across the sky, the leaden menace of the day, and the seas which far away humped themselves against the horizon in ever melting mountain chains.
It was not until they were outside the Mewstone — its emerald green all sobered to a livid grey and not a sea-bird’s wail audible above the storm — that the wind smote them. The Sea Flower leapt like a stag surprised, lurched and was flung forward, her bows crashing upon the waves. Mona, hurled across the cockpit, sank on to its floor. There was such a roar of sea and wind as made her dizzy. She had thought that she hadn’t cared what was going to happen; but in the presence of this elemental fury she crouched sick with fear. Mark reached down a hand and patted her shoulder. He shouted some words. She could not hear what they were, but the expression of his face told her that they were words of encouragement. It couldn’t be that any ship could live in such a welter; it couldn’t be that the planks would hold together against the massive blows of the succeeding waves. But the ship did live; rolling and creaking and groaning it fled across the open bay.
Mona watched Mark Thewliss’ face. It was never still. Now his head was turned astern watching the great waves as they rushed forwards; now he stared at the sail lest the wind should get behind it; and the tiller in his hand was never still either, as now he eased it to take the thrust of a billow, now he held the cutter to her course. After a while Mona climbed on to the seat and clung to the combing. The air was thick with spume, the wind tore across the sea in black squalls, the water itself was blistered and gleamed with points of steel. In a moment of relaxation Thewliss bent and bawled in her ear:
“We should think nothing of this on a liner.”
But they were not on a liner; and for the life of her Mona could not understand why each big green wave, racing up with so much bluster and menace, slipped away under the long counter and only flung a lump or two of heavy water over them into the cockpit. There was no question and indeed no thought of meals that day. Before two o’clock Mona saw in a break of the storm the great bluff of Portland ahead of them in the north-east. Here was a new terror.
“The Race!” she cried, making a trumpet of her hands.
Mark reassured her with a smile.
“I am keeping outside it.”
The wind veered round to the north after midday, and the seas diminished in violence, coming off the land and taking the cutter on its port side so that it could be steered with less danger of a gybe and a broach to. It was now four o’clock in the afternoon and Weymouth Bay was opening up beyond the Bill. All through those hours Mark Thewliss had sat at the tiller, never for a moment relaxing his attention, soaked to the skin and blue with cold.
“The worst of it’s over,” he said, stretching his cramped limbs. “We’ll make across the bay to Lulworth Cove. We can lie quiet there to-night.”
Wind and sea plagued the Sea Flower less and less as she felt the shelter of the downs. Mona saw again the white road running up the hill to the solitary tree, and the uncomplimentary horseman turning his tail to the town; and in an incredibly short time the steep escarpment of the Lulworth cliffs and the ochre-coloured coastguard station were close at hand. The Sea Flower passed through the narrow portals, her cockpit swimming with water and the stain of the sea darkening her sail to the peak. In that quiet haven she came to rest.
“What I want is a whisky and soda,” said Mark with a grin.
The cabin was a scene of wreckage and disorder. Everything which should be on a shelf was on the floor, and everything that could be broken was broken. Thewliss replaced the cushions on the settee and Mona got the whisky and the soda-water bottles and the glasses from their racks.
“Good, eh?” said Mark as he emptied his glass in a single draught. Mona took hers in a more leisurely way.
Thewliss opened his oilskin coat, replenished his glass, and lit a pipe.
“A ship the Sea Flower,” and he patted the ledge of the settee in commendation. Mona watched him with shi
ning eyes.
“This morning — before we started out of Dartmouth — you knew what we were in for?”
“Pretty well.”
“And it was dangerous — really dangerous — all the way?”
“All the way to Weymouth Bay. If a following sea had broken upon us or if we had broached to — we were done.”
“Yet you took the risk?”
“I offered to send you on by train, didn’t I?” he urged.
“I wasn’t thinking of myself. You had that partnership in your pocket.”
Thewliss nodded his head.
“I was mad, I suppose.” Then he broke into a hearty laugh. “But I couldn’t have borne to turn tail like the horseman in the chalk. Not for a thousand partnerships! I enjoyed it, too. I was frightened out of my life, but I enjoyed it.”
That day had set him high again on a throne in Mona’s heart. There had been moments when the feet of clay had obtruded upon her vision. But here was the man she had dreamed of, putting gallantly everything — herself of course, but even life that he so clung to — in the scales. To her he was made of the fibre of the gods...and he was not for her.
The storm blew itself out in the night, and starting early with a fair wind on their beam they made the Isle of Wight by midday, struggled against the tide for three hours opposite to Hurst Castle and towards evening beat up Southampton Water. Mark was forward, stowing away the foresail in the hatch, when they approached a buoy with its name staring in white letters from the black paint.
“Keep clear of the Dean’s Elbow,” he cried.
Mona put the cutter about.
“We have kept clear of the Dean’s Elbow, and the Bishop too, my dear,” she answered with a little smile; and, leaning over to one side, she slipped the wedding-ring off her finger and let it fall into the water.
Mark Thewliss left for London by the breakfast train on the next morning. Mona, who had two hours before her cross-country journey to the north, saw him off. Mark showed the grace of a great embarrassment.
“You have been wonderful to me, Mona. I have never had such a splendid month in my life,” He shifted from one foot to the other. “You’ll let me hear from you?”
Mona nodded her head. She could not trust her lips to speak. And the whistle blew. Mona walked out of the station when the train had disappeared, and stood at the rails of the sea-wall looking down Southampton Water. She could see quite clearly the Sea Flower at its anchor. There were two men upon her deck, who had been summoned by telegraph the night before to take her round to a yard on the Hamble River. Mona saw the mainsail hoisted and the jib broken out. She watched the cutter move down the channel until her tears blinded her. She had never dreamed that anyone could feel so desolate.
VII. GETTING ON
“THE HONOURABLE MEMBER for the Amworth Division.”
“Mr. Speaker, Question forty-eight of the Chancellor of the Exchequer.”
“In answer to the Honourable Member...”
“Arising out of that answer, Mr. Speaker, I should like to ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer...”
Question and answer, supplementary question and supplementary answer, were being exchanged across the floor of the great Chamber up the stairs, sometimes with a genuine desire for knowledge, sometimes to gratify a valuable constituent, sometimes just to get one on. Mark Thewliss, walking the Terrace alone on a February afternoon at three o’clock, wished that the question time could be extended until the House rose at eleven o’clock of the evening. He might be a coward — he was perfectly willing to admit that he was — but he did wish it extremely. He walked up and down. He had on neither overcoat nor hat. It was cold but he did not feel cold, for his physical sensations were in a very complete abeyance.
He had the sequence of his argument in order, so long of course as he did not lose one of the main links — an occurrence which was indeed very possible, if not unavoidable. On the whole he was inclined to consider it unavoidable. He was sure, however, of his facts and figures. For they had not been worked up from pamphlets and textbooks, they were the commonplaces of his daily life. Yes, he was sure of his ground there, if only his mind didn’t suddenly go blank. Minds often did, even the best minds, much better minds than his. Darkness descended upon them, inextricable, swathing them in thick folds. He himself had never yet been reduced to an ashamed and tingling cipher by one of these seizures, but they always chose ruinous moments. There was a slang phrase which described them — horribly graphic, too, like most slang phrases. To go blah. Well, there it was! He, Mark Thewliss, would go blah this afternoon.
“Let me repeat it,” he reflected, shaking himself back into his wits. “The Right Honourable gentleman’s line of thought must always — and I say it with sincerity and deference — command the sympathetic attention of the House, but in this instance...”
All very good, but supposing the Right Honourable gentleman didn’t deploy that line of thought at all — where was he, Mark Thewliss? On his legs — and with nothing to say.
“But he must use that line of thought,” Mark argued with a little more of his native confidence. “I have watched him, listened to him, examined the works — yes, he’ll think like that, speak like that...Of course I’ll have to get the best opening I can out of what he says. I couldn’t prepare that...I must appear to be debating even if I am not.”
He noticed a lot of small yachts moored on the other side of the Thames under St. Thomas’ Hospital. They had always been moored there, but he had never realised before what singularly sensible people their proprietors were. Now if he had only got the Sea Flower moored over there, he could nip across Westminster Bridge, cast off and, with this wind blowing, be abreast of the Savoy Hotel before the Right Honourable gentleman had begun to think aloud with that mixture of languid grace, halting speech and intellectual clarity which made him at once so attractive and so formidable a figure.
But the Sea Flower wasn’t moored there. She was in a yard on the Hamble river and had been for a good many years, waiting — after all what for? For a summer when he would have her sold. He was always quick to make that assertion whenever the question forced itself into his mind, as it would at awkward moments when he was not upon his guard. Such a moment was dangerously near to him now. Ambition was all folly. There were sprigs of the great families already in the House of Commons at the age of twenty-two. They had by twenty good years the advantage over their competitors. They could afford to sit mum for five years and then rise up in an arena no more alarming to them than the side walks in front of their houses. What was he doing here, a new member at the age of forty-four?
“Mr. Speaker, it would need an audacity greater than mine to follow the Right Honourable gentleman, but for—”
How utterly, damnably, trivial and silly it sounded. “Thinking it out, eh?”
A friendly hand fell upon his arm. Mark Thewliss turned with a jerk to see Lord Catherstone, a Junior Lord of the Treasury, smiling at him out of a friendly rubicund round face.
“Are questions over?” he asked in alarm.
“Not a bit of it. Five more minutes, then the division over the suspension of the eleven o’clock rule. There’ll be half an hour before your man’s up.”
Suddenly Mark Thewliss felt that he couldn’t wait for half an hour. Rules or no rules, his man must get up at once. Mark took a step towards the door, but the friendly hand restrained him.
“Take your time! Don’t even hurry when R. T. sits down. The Speaker will call on you all right. That’s been arranged.” Yes, that had been arranged. He had always thought that he would sink through the floor with humiliation if he had to rise eight or nine times and never be called upon. Now he would adore it.
“You’ll make a success all right,” said the Junior Whip, with the experience of seven years at his back.
“If nerves can do it!”
“Nerves do do it.”
“Not always.”
Mark Thewliss recalled to Lord Catherstone the brilliant young M
arcellus of the Law, who had sprung out of a northern city and swept the political world off its feet.
“I asked him if he was nervous, and he said — you know how his supercilious look breaks up into the friendliest human sort of grin. ‘No. From my earliest childhood I lisped in numbers and the numbers came. They weren’t very good numbers, but they came.’”
Catherstone laughed.
“I can cap that. You weren’t in the House with that hardened old sinner Miramond. He once asked me to arrange that he should speak in a debate which was proceeding. It was an Imperial question and I was astonished. I said, ‘Why? It isn’t your subject.’ He answered: ‘I know that. But I’m wearing a new set of teeth and I want to try ’em out.’ What do you say to that?”
“That I should be half inclined to give my teeth for a cynicism so sublime,” Thewliss returned.
The Junior Whip, having done his friendly office, went upon his busy way. Members began to stroll out upon the Terrace. Questions were at an end. The Division bells started ringing. It was at once a comfort, a spur, and an added terror to Thewliss to realise, as he could not but do, that the Government was nursing him He recorded his vote and took his seat behind the Treasury Bench; he was in for it now, and as “R. T.” rose from the Opposition Front Bench, the turbulence of his emotions went down like a sea in a falling wind. He was just as nervous, but he was no longer aware of his nervousness. He listened for words which would give him the opportunity of a natural, effective, debating introduction.
* * * * *
There are on an average six maiden speeches made in every new Parliament, each of which in turn is declared the day after its delivery to be the best maiden speech ever made. Mark Thewliss’ was one of the six in that Parliament. He was helped by circumstances. For on a subject which was creating uneasiness throughout the country he had something genuinely reassuring to contribute out of his own particular knowledge and experience. Only an unfortunate manner could have spoilt him, but he had sat watching for too many weeks, with too shrewd an eye for a lapse of tact or an exhibition of bumptiousness, to make an error in that direction.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 592