We splashed through a string of puddles. I began to remember things I had meant to say.
"Look here!" I cried. "I want to help you beyond measure. You are entangled. What is the trouble? I asked you to marry me.
You said you would. But there's something."
My thoughts sounded clumsy as I said them.
"Is it something about my position?... Or is it something--perhaps--about some other man?"
There was an immense assenting silence.
"You've puzzled me so. At first--I mean quite early--I thought you meant to make me marry you."
"I did."
"And then?"
"To-night," she said after a long pause, "I can't explain. No!
I can't explain. I love you! But--explanations! To-night my dear, here we are in the world alone--and the world doesn't matter. Nothing matters. Here I am in the cold with you and my bed away there deserted. I'd tell you--I will tell you when things enable me to tell you, and soon enough they will. But to-night--I won't--I won't."
She left my side and went in front of me.
She turned upon me. "Look here," she said, "I insist upon your being dead. Do you understand? I'm not joking. To-night you and I are out of life. It's our time together. There may be other times, but this we won't spoil. We're--in Hades if you like. Where there's nothing to hide and nothing to tell. No bodies even. No bothers. We loved each other--down there--and were kept apart, but now it doesn't matter. It's over.... If you won't agree to that--I will go home."
"I wanted," I began.
"I know. Oh! my dear, if you'd only understand I understand. If you'd only not care--and love me to-night."
"I do love you," I said.
"Then LOVE me," she answered, "and leave all the things that bother you. Love me! Here I am!"
"But!--"
"No!" she said.
"Well, have your way."
So she carried her point, and we wandered into the night together and Beatrice talked to me of love....
I'd never heard a woman before in all my life who could talk of love, who could lay bare and develop and touch with imagination all that mass of fine emotion every woman, it may be, hides. She had read of love, she had thought of love, a thousand sweet lyrics had sounded through her brain and left fine fragments in her memory; she poured it out, all of it, shamelessly, skilfully, for me. I cannot give any sense of that talk, I cannot even tell how much of the delight of it was the magic of her voice, the glow of her near presence. And always we walked swathed warmly through a chilly air, along dim, interminable greasy roads--with never a soul abroad it seemed to us, never a beast in the fields.
"Why do people love each other?" I said.
"Why not?"
"But why do I love you? Why is your voice better than any voice, your face sweeter than any face?"
"And why do I love you?" she asked; "not only what is fine in you, but what isn't? Why do I love your dullness, your arrogance? For I do. To--night I love the very raindrops on the fur of your coat!"...
So we talked; and at last very wet, still glowing but a little tired, we parted at the garden door. We had been wandering for two hours in our strange irrational community of happiness, and all the world about us, and particularly Lady Osprey and her household, had been asleep--and dreaming of anything rather than Beatrice in the night and rain.
She stood in the doorway, a muffled figure with eyes that glowed.
"Come back," she whispered. "I shall wait for you."
She hesitated.
She touched the lapel of my coat. "I love you NOW," she said, and lifted her face to mine.
I held her to me and was atremble from top to toe. "O God!" I cried. "And I must go!"
She slipped from my arms and paused, regarding me. For an instant the world seemed full of fantastic possibilities.
"Yes, GO!" she said, and vanished and slammed the door upon me, leaving me alone like a man new fallen from fairyland in the black darkness of the night.
III
That expedition to Mordet Island stands apart from all the rest of my life, detached, a piece by itself with an atmosphere of its own. It would, I suppose, make a book by itself--it has made a fairly voluminous official report--but so far as this novel of mine goes it is merely an episode, a contributory experience, and I mean to keep it at that.
Vile weather, an impatient fretting against unbearable slowness and delay, sea--sickness, general discomfort and humiliating self--revelation are the master values of these memories.
I was sick all through the journey out. I don't know why. It was the only time I was ever sea-sick, and I have seen some pretty bad weather since I became a boat-builder. But that phantom smell of potatoes was peculiarly vile to me. Coming back on the brig we were all ill, every one of us, so soon as we got to sea, poisoned, I firmly believe, by quap. On the way out most of the others recovered in a few days, but the stuffiness below, the coarse food, the cramped dirty accommodation kept me, if not actually sea-sick, in a state of acute physical wretchedness the whole time. The ship abounded in cockroaches and more intimate vermin. I was cold all the time until after we passed Cape Verde, then I became steamily hot; I had been too preoccupied with Beatrice and my keen desire to get the Maud Mary under way at once, to consider a proper wardrobe for myself, and in particular I lacked a coat. Heavens! how I lacked that coat!
And, moreover, I was cooped up with two of the worst bores in Christendom, Pollack and the captain. Pollack, after conducting his illness in a style better adapted to the capacity of an opera house than a small compartment, suddenly got insupportably well and breezy, and produced a manly pipe in which he smoked a tobacco as blond as himself, and divided his time almost equally between smoking it and trying to clean it. "There's only three things you can clean a pipe with," he used to remark with a twist of paper in hand. "The best's a feather, the second's a straw, and the third's a girl's hairpin. I never see such a ship. You can't find any of 'em. Last time I came this way I did find hairpins anyway, and found 'em on the floor of the captain's cabin. Regular deposit. Eh?... Feelin' better?"
