safely reply.
'It seemed just a bit of foolery at first,' he went on. 'I woke up properly ashamed of myself after Gib, I don't mind telling you. Since then it's been getting so different, and now it's nothing but us. I tell you one thing though, one silly mistake I've made. I ought never to have mentioned you in that letter to the Mater. There's no advantage in putting her on the scent of something she can't understand; it's all right what we do, I don't mean that.'
'So you want the letter back?'
'But it's posted! Not much use wanting it.'
'Posted?' He was back to his normal and laughed gaily, his sharp teeth gleaming. 'What is posting? Nothing at all, even in a red English pillar-box. Even thence you can get most things out, and here is a boat. No! My secretary comes to you tomorrow morning: 'Excuse me, Captain March, sir, did you perhaps drop this unposted letter upon the deck?' You thank secretary, you take letter, you write Mater a better letter. Does anything trouble you now?'
'Not really. Except '
'Except what?'
'Except I'm?I don't know. I'm fonder of you than I know how to say.'
'Should that trouble you?'
O calm mutual night, to one of them triumphant and promising both of them peace! O silence except for the boat throbbing gently! Lionel sighed, with a happiness he couldn't understand. 'You ought to have someone to look after you,' he said tenderly. Had he said this before to a woman and had she responded? No such recollection disturbed him, he did not even know that he was falling in love. 'I wish I could stay with you myself, but of course that's out of the question. If only things were a little different I Come along, let's get our sleep.'
'You shall sleep and you shall awake.' For the moment was upon them at last, the flower opened to receive them, the appointed star mounted the sky, the beloved leaned against him to switch off the light over by the door. He closed his eyes to anticipate divine darkness. He was going to win. All was happening as he had planned, and when morning came and practical life had to be re-entered he would have won.
'Damn!'
The ugly stupid little word rattled out. 'Damn and blast,' Lionel muttered. As he stretched towards the switch, he had noticed the bolt close to it, and he discovered that he had left the door unbolted. The consequences could have been awkward. 'Pretty careless of me,' he reflected, suddenly wide awake. He looked round the cabin as a general might at a battlefield nearly lost by his own folly. The crouched figure was only a unit in it, and no longer the centre of desire. 'Cocoa, I'm awfully sorry,' he went on. 'As a rule it's you who take the risks, this time it's me. I apologize.'
The other roused himself from the twilight where he had hoped to be joined, and tried to follow the meaningless words. Something must have miscarried, but what? The sound of an apology was odious. He had always loathed the English trick of saying 'It's all my fault'; and if he encountered it in business
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THE OTHER BOAT / 2075
it provided an extra incentive to cheat, and it was contemptible on the lips of a hero. When he grasped what the little trouble was and what the empty 'damns' signified, he closed his eyes again and said, 'Bolt the door therefore.'
'I have.'
'Turn out the light therefore.'
'I will. But a mistake like this makes one feel all insecure. It could have meant a courtmartial.'
'Could it, man?' he said sadly?sad because the moment towards which they were moving might be passing, because the chances of their convergence might be lost. What could he safely say? 'You was not to blame over the door, dear Lion,' he said. 'I mean we was both to blame. I knew it was unlocked all the time.' He said this hoping to console the beloved and to recall him to the entrance of night. He could not have made a more disastrous remark.
'You knew. But why didn't you say?'
'I had not the time.'
'Not the time to say 'Bolt the door'?'
'No, I had not the time. I did not speak because there was no moment for such a speech.' 'No moment when I've been here for ages?' 'And when in that hour? When you come in first? Then? When you embrace
me and summon my heart's blood. Is that the moment to speak? When I rest in your arms and you in mine, when your cigarette burns us, when we drink from one glass? When you are smiling? Do I interrupt then? Do I then say, 'Captain March, sir, you have however forgotten to bolt the cabin door?' And when we talk of our faraway boat and of poor pretty Baby whom I never killed and I did not want to kill, and I never dreamt to kill?of what should we talk but of things far away? Lionel, no, no. Lion of the Night, come back to me before our hearts cool. Here is our place and we have so far no other and only we can guard each other. The door shut, the door unshut, is nothing, and is the same.'
'It wouldn't be nothing if the steward had come in,' said Lionel grimly.
'What harm if he did come in?'
'Give him the shock of his life, to say the least of it.'
'No shock at all. Such men are accustomed to far worse. He would be sure of a larger tip and therefore pleased. 'Excuse me, gentlemen . . .' Then he goes and tomorrow my secretary tips him.'
'Cocoa, for God's sake, the things you sometimes say . . The cynicism repelled him. He noticed that it sometimes came after a bout of high faluting. It was a sort of backwash.' 'You never seem to realize the risks we run, either. Suppose I got fired from the Army through this.'
