Somehow Good Part 56

Sally was curious to know exactly what lines the Octopus had operated on. That would do later, though. She would get Prosy by himself, and make him tell her all about it. In the course of time tea died a natural death. Fenwick indulged in a yawn and a great shake, and remembered that he had no end of letters to answer. Mr. and Mrs.

Julius Bradshaw suddenly thought, for no reasonable reason, that they ought to be getting back. But they didn't really go home. They went for a walk landward; as it was so windy, instead--remember that they were only in the third week of their honeymoon! Sally, with Talleyrand-like diplomacy, achieved that she and Dr. Conrad should go for another walk in another direction. The sea was getting up and the gla.s.s was going down, and it would be fun to go and see the waves break over the jetty. So said Sally, and Dr. Conrad thought so too, unequivocally. They walked away in the big sea-wind, fraught with a great inheritance from the Atlantic of cool warmth and dry moisture.

And if you don't know what that means, you know mighty little of the ocean in question.

Rosalind watched them through the window, closed perforce, and saw them disappear round the flagstaff with the south cone hoisted, holding their heads on to all appearance. She said to herself: "Foolish fellow, why can't he speak?" And her husband answered either her thought or her words--though he could hardly have heard them as he sat driving his pen furiously through letters--with: "He'll have to confess up, Rosey, you'll see, before he goes."

She made no reply; but, feeling a bit tired, lay down to rest on the sofa. And so powerful was the sea air, and the effect of a fair allowance of exercise, that she fell into a doze in spite of the intensely wakeful properties of Mrs. Lobjoit's horsehair sofa, which only a corrugated person could stop on without a maintained effort, so that sound sleep was impossible. She never became quite unconscious of the scratching pen and the moaning wind; so, as she did not sleep, yet did not want to wake, she remained hovering on the borderland of dreams. One minute she thought she was thinking, sanely, about Sally and her silent lover--always uppermost in her thoughts--the next, she was alive to the absurdity of some dream-thing one of them had suddenly changed to, unnoticed. Once, half awake, she was beginning to consider, seriously, whether she could not legitimately approach the Octopus on the subject, but only to find, the moment after, that the Octopus (while remaining the same) had become the chubby little English clergyman that had married her to Gerry at Umballa, twenty years ago. Then she thought she would wake, and took steps towards doing it; but, as ill-luck would have it, she began to speak before she had achieved her purpose. And the result was: "Do you remember the Reverend Samuel Herrick, Gerry, at Umb----Oh dear! I'm not awake....

I was talking nonsense." Gerry laughed.

"Wake up, love!" said he. "Do your fine intelligence justice! What was it you said? Reverend Samuel who?"

"I forget, darling. I was dreaming." Then, with a nettle-grasping instinct, as one determined to flinch from nothing, "Reverend Samuel Herrick. What did you think I said?"

"Reverend Samuel Herrick or Meyrick.... 'Not negotiable.' I don't mean the Reverend Sam, whoever he is, but the payee whose account I'm enriching." He folded the cheque he had been writing into its letter and enveloped it. But he paused on the brink of its gummed edge, looking over it at Rosalind, who was still engaged getting quite awake. "I know the name well enough. He's some chap! I expect you saw him in the 'Chronicle.'"

"Very likely, darling! He must be some chap, when you come to think of it." She says this slightly, as a mere rounding-off speech. Then goes behind her husband's chair and kisses him over his shoulder as he directs the envelope.

"Marmaduke, Copestake, d.i.c.kinson, and Humphreys," says he, as he writes the names. "Now I call that a firm-and-a-half. Old Broad Street, E.C. _That's_ all!--as far as _he_ goes. Now, how about Puckeridge, Limited?"

"Don't write any more, Gerry dear; you'll spoil your eyes. Come and look at the sunset. Come along!" For a blood-red forecast of storm in the west, surer than the surest human barometer, is blazing through the window that cannot be opened for the blow, and turning the sh.e.l.l-work rabbit and the story of Goliath into gold and jewels. The sun is glancing through a rift in the cloud-bank, to say good-night to the winds and seas, and wish them joy of the high old time they mean to have in his absence, in the dark.

The lurid level rays that make an indescribable glory of Rosalind's halo-growth of hair as Gerry sees it against the window, have no ill-boding in them for either--no more, that is, than always has belonged to a rough night closing over the sea, and will do so always until the sea is ice again on a planet sick to death. As he draws her arm round his neck and she his round her waist, and they glance at each other in the flaming glow, there is no thought in either of any ill impending for themselves.

"I wish Sarah were here to see you now, Rosey."

"So should I, love! Only she would see you too. And then she'd make you vainer than you are already. All men are patches of Vanity. But I forgive you." She kisses him slightly in confirmation. They certainly were a wonderful sight, the two of them, a minute ago, when the light was at its best. Yes!--they wish Sally had been there, each on the other's account. It was difficult to say which of the two had thought of Sally first. Both had this habit of registering the _rapport_ of everything to Sally as a first duty.

But a sunset glow, like this one, lasts, maybe, little longer than a highest song-note may be sustained. It was to die. But Rosalind and Gerry watched it out. His cheek was resting in the thick ma.s.s of soft gold, just moving slightly to be well aware of it. The sun-ray touched it, last of anything in the room, and died....

"What's that, dear love? _Why?_..." It was Rosalind that spoke.

"Nothing, dearest! No, nothing!... Indeed, nothing at all!"

"Gerry, what _was_ it?"

"What was what, dear?"

"What made you leave off so suddenly?"

For the slightly intermittent movement of his cheek on her hair--what hairy thing is there that does not love to be stroked?--had stopped; and his hand that held hers had slipped from it, and rested for a moment on his own forehead.

"It's gone now. It was a sort of recurrence. I haven't been having them lately...."

"Come and sit down, love. There, now, don't fidget! What was it about?" Does he look pale?--thinks Rosalind--or is it only the vanished glow?

He is uncommunicative. Suppose they go out for a turn before dinner, he suggests. They can walk down to the jetty, to meet Sarah and her medical adviser. Soon said, soon settled. Ten minutes more, and they are on their way to the fisher dwellings: experiencing three-quarters of a gale, it appears, on the testimony of an Ancient Mariner in a blue and white-striped woollen s.h.i.+rt, who knows about things.

"That was _very_ queer, that recurrence!" Thus Gerry, after leaving the Ancient Mariner. "It was just as the little edge of the sun went behind the bank. And what do you think my mind hooked it on to, of all things in the world?" Rosalind couldn't guess, of course. "Why, a big wheel I was trying to stop, that went slowly--slowly--like the sun vanis.h.i.+ng. And then just as the sun went it stopped."

"Was there anything else?" Entire concealment of alarm is all Rosalind can attend to.

"No end of things, all mixed up together. One thing very funny. A great big German chap.... I say, Rosalind!"

"What, Gerry darling?"

"Do you recollect, when we were in Switzerland, up at that last high-up place, Seelisberg--Sonnenberg--do you remember the great fat Baron that gave me those cigars, and sang?"

"Remember the Baron? Of course I do. Perfectly!" Rosalind contrived a laugh. "Was he in it?" Perhaps this was rash. But then, not to say it would have been cowardice, when it was on her tongue-tip. Let the nettle be grasped.

"He was in it, singing and all. But the whole thing was mixed up and queer. It all went, quite suddenly. And I should have lost him out of it, as one loses a dream, if it hadn't been for seeing him in Switzerland. It was something to hold on by. Do you understand?"

"I think I do. _I_ had forgotten what I was dreaming about when I woke on the sofa and talked that nonsense. But I held on to the name, for all that."

"But then that wasn't a real person, the Reverend--what was he?--Herrick or Derrick."

Rosalind pa.s.sed the point by. "Gerry darling! I want you to do as I tell you. Don't worry your head about it, but keep quiet. If memory is coming back to you, it will come all the quicker for letting your mind rest. Let it come gradually."

"I see what you mean. You think it was really a recollection of B.C.?"

"I think so. Why should it not?"

"But it's all gone clean away again! And I can't remember anything of it at all--and there was heaps!"

"Never mind! If it was real it will come back. Wait and be patient!"

Rosalind's mind laid down this rule for itself--to think and act exactly as though there had been nothing to fear. Even if all the past had been easy to face it would have shrunk from suggestions.

So thought she to herself, perhaps with a little excusable self-deception. Otherwise the natural thing would have been to repeat to him all the Baron's story.

No! She would not say a word, or give a hint. If it was all to come back to him, it would come back. If not, she could not bring it back; and she might, in the attempt to do so, merely plunge his injured mind into more chaotic confusion. Much safer to do nothing!

But why this sudden stirring of his memory, just now of all times?

Had anything unusual happened lately? Naturally, the inquiry sent her mind back, to yesterday first, then to the day before. No!--there was nothing there. Then to generalities. Was it the sea bathing?--the sea air? And then on a sudden she thought of the thing nearest at hand, that she should have thought of at first. Yes!--she would ask Dr. Conrad about _that_: Why hadn't she thought of that before--that galvanic battery?

Meanwhile, despite her injunctions to her husband to wait and be patient, his mind kept harking back on this curious recollection.

Luckily, so it seemed to her--at any rate for the present--he did not seem to recall the Baron's recognition of himself, or to connect it with this illusion or revival. He appeared to recollect the Baron's personality, and his liberality with cigars, but little else. If he was to be reminded of this, it must be after she had talked over it with Vereker.

They struggled with the weather along the seaward face of the little old fisher-town. The great wind was blowing the tar-laden atmosphere of the nets and the all-pervading smell of tar landward; and subst.i.tuting flecks of driven foam, that it forced to follow landward too, for all they tried to stop and rest. The population was mostly employed getting the boats up as close to the houses as practice permitted, and the capstans were all a-creak with the strain; and one shrieked for a dab of lard, and got it, just as they pa.s.sed. The man with Bessie and the anchor on his arms--for it was his--paused in his rotations with one elbow on his lever, and one foot still behind the taut cable he was crossing. His free hand saluted; and then, his position being defined, he was placed on a moral equality with his superiors, and could converse. The old-fas.h.i.+oned hat-touch, now dying out, is just as much a protest against the way social order parts man from man as it is an acknowledgment of its necessity.

The lover of Bessie and Elinor and Kate was disposed to ignore the efforts of the wind. There might, he said, be a bit of sea on, come two or three in the marn'n--at the full of the tide. The wind might get up a bit, if it went round suth'ard. The wind was nothing in itself--it was the direction it came from; it got a bad character from imputed or vicarious vice. It would be a bit rough to get a boat off--the lady might get a wetting.... At which point Rosalind interrupted. Nothing was further from her thoughts, she said, than navigation in any form. But had the speaker seen her daughter go by--the young lady that swam? For Sally was famous. He hadn't, himself, but maybe young Benjamin had. Who, taking leave to speak from this, announced frankly that he _had_ seen a young lady, in company with her sweetheart, go by nigh an hour agone. The tattooed one diluted her sweetheart down to "her gentleman" reluctantly. In his land, and the one there would soon be for the freckled and blue-eyed Benjamin, there was no such artificial nonsense. Perhaps some sense of this showed itself in the way he resumed his work. "Now, young Benjamin--a-action!" said he; and the two threw themselves again against the pole of the mollified capstan.

If Rosalind fancied this little incident had put his previous experience out of her husband's mind she was mistaken. He said, as they pa.s.sed on in the direction of the jetty, "I think I should like to wind up capstans. It would suit me down to the ground." But then became thoughtful; and, just as they were arriving at the jetty, showed that his mind had run back by asking suddenly, "What was the fat Baron's name?"

"Diedrich Kammerkreutz." Rosalind gave him her nearest recollection, seeing nothing to be gained by doing otherwise. Any concealment, too, the chances were, would make matters worse instead of better.

"It was Kreutzkammer, in my--dream or whatever you call it." They stopped and looked at each other, and Rosalind replied, "It _was_ Kreutzkammer. Oh dear!" rather as one who had lost breath from some kind of blow.

He saw her distress instantly, and was all alive to soothe it.

"Don't be frightened, darling love!" he cried, and then his great good-humoured laugh broke into the tenderness of his speech, without spoiling it. He was so like Gerry, the boy that rode away that day in the dog-cart, when there was "only mamma for the girl."

"But when all's said and done," said she, harking back for a reprieve, "perhaps you only recollected Sonnenberg in your dream better than I did ... just now...." She hung fire of repeating the name Herrick.