09 Not George Washington

the dancers of the Assembly Rooms.

The constraint which had been upon us during our former conversation vanished at breakfast. We were both hungry, and we had a common topic. We related our story of the sea in alternate sentences. We ate and we talked, turn and turn about. My mother listened. To her the affair, compared with the tremendous subjects to which she was accustomed to direct her mind, was broad farce. James took it with an air of restrained amusement. I, seriously.

Tentatively, I diverged from this subject towards other and wider fields. Impressions of Guernsey, which drew from him his address, at the St. Peter’s Port Hotel. The horrors of the sea passage from Weymouth, which extorted a comment on the limitations of England. England. London. Kensington. South Kensington. The Gunton-Cresswells? Yes, yes! Extraordinary. Curious coincidence. Excursus on smallness of world. Queer old gentleman, Mr. Gunton- Cresswell. He is, indeed. Quite one of the old school. Oh, quite. Still wears that beaver hat? Does he really? Yes. Ha, ha! Yes.

Here the humanising influence of the Teutonic school of philosophic analysis was demonstrated by my mother’s action. Mr. Cloyster, she said, must reconcile himself to exchanging his comfortable rooms at the St. Peter’s Port— (“I particularly dislike half-filled hotel life, Mrs. Goodwin”)—for the shelter of our cottage. He accepted. He was then “warned” that I was chef at the cottage. Mother gave him “a chance to change his mind.” Something was said about my saving life and destroying digestion. He went to collect his things in an ecstasy of merriment.

At this point I committed an indiscretion which can only be excused by the magnitude of the occasion.

My mother had retired to her favourite bow-window where, by a tour de force on the part of the carpenter, a system of low, adjustable bookcases had been craftily constructed in such a way that when she sat in her window-seat they jutted in a semicircle towards her hand.

James, whom I had escorted down the garden path, had left me at the little wooden gate and had gone swinging down the road. I, shielded from outside observation (if any) by a line of lilacs, gazed rapturously at his retreating form. The sun was high in the sky now. It was a perfect summer’s day. Birds were singing. Their notes blended with the gentle murmur of the sea on the beach below. Every fibre of my body was thrilling with the magic of the morning.

Through the kindly branches of the lilac I watched him, and then, as though in obedience to the primaeval call of that July sunshine, I stood on tiptoe, and blew him a kiss.

I realised in an instant what I had done. Fool that I had been. The bow-window!

I was rigid with discomfiture. My mother’s eyes were on the book she held. And yet a faint smile seemed to hover round her lips. I walked in silence to where she sat at the open window.

She looked up. Her smile was more pronounced.

“Margie,” she said.

“Yes, mother?”

“The hedonism of Voltaire is the indictment of an honest bore.”

“Yes, mother.”

She then resumed her book.

CHAPTER 2

JAMES SETS OUT (Miss Margaret Goodwin’s narrative continued)

Those August days! Have there been any like them before? I realise with difficulty that the future holds in store for me others as golden.

The island was crammed with trippers. They streamed in by every boat. But James and I were infinitely alone. I loved him from the first, from the moment when he had rowed out of the unknown into my life, clad in a dressing- gown. I like to think that he loved me from that moment, too. But, if he did, the knowledge that he did came to him only after a certain delay. It was my privilege to watch this knowledge steal gradually but surely upon him.

We were always together; and as the days passed by he spoke freely of himself and his affairs, obeying unconsciously the rudder of my tactful inquisitiveness. By the end of the first week I knew as much about him as he did himself.

It seemed that a guardian—an impersonal sort of business man with a small but impossible family—was the most commanding figure in his private life. As for his finances, five-and-forty sovereigns, the remnant of a larger sum which had paid for his education at Cambridge, stood between him and the necessity of offering for hire a sketchy acquaintance with general literature and a third class in the classical tripos.

He had come to Guernsey to learn by personal observation what chances tomato growing held out to a young man in a hurry to get rich.

“Tomato growing?” I echoed dubiously. And then, to hide a sense of bathos, “People have made it pay. Of course, they work very hard.”

“M’yes,” said James without much enthusiasm.

“But I fancy,” I added, “the life is not at all unpleasant.”

At this point embarrassment seemed to engulf James. He blushed, swallowed once or twice in a somewhat convulsive manner, and stammered.

Then he made his confession guiltily.

I was not to suppose that his aims ceased with the attainment of a tomato-farm. The nurture of a wholesome vegetable occupied neither the whole of his ambitions nor even the greater part of them. To write—the agony with which he throatily confessed it!—to be swept into the maelstrom of literary journalism, to be en rapport with the unslumbering forces of Fleet Street—those were the real objectives of James Orlebar Cloyster.

“Of course, I mean,” he said, “I suppose it would be a bit of a struggle at first, if you see what I mean. What I mean to say is, rejected manuscripts, and so on. But still, after a bit, once get a footing, you know—I should like to have a dash at it. I mean, I think I could do something, you know.”

“Of course you could,” I said.