Silence.
“Lady, if we come with you to your studio, will you give us pennies?”
“No. Why should I?”
“You might because you wanted to paint us. You might because you liked us.”
“I don’t do either. Go away now.”
They withdrew a little and turned somersaults, supposing her to be watching. The artistic colony had a lot to answer for, Nan thought; they were making parasites and prostitutes of the infant populace. Children could at their worst be detestable in their vanity, their posing, their affectation, their unashamed greed.
“Barry’s and mine,” she thought (I suppose we’ll have some), “shall at least not pose. They may break all the commandments, but if they turn somersaults to be looked at I shall drop them into a public crèche and abandon them.”
The prettiest little girl looked sidelong at the unkind lady, and believed her half-smile to denote admiration. Pretty little girls often make this error.
Stephen Lumley came along the beach. It was lunch time, and after lunch they were going out sailing. Stephen Lumley was the most important artist just now in Newlyn. He had been in love with Nan for some months, and did not get on with his wife. Nan liked him; he painted brilliantly, and was an attractive, clever, sardonic person. Sailing with him was fun. They understood each other; they had rather the same cynical twist to them. They understood each other really better than Nan and Barry did. Neither of them needed to make any effort to comprehend each other’s point of view. And each left the other where he was. Whereas Barry filled Nan, beneath her cynicism, beneath her levity, with something quite new—a queer desire, to put it simply, for goodness, for straight living and generous thinking, even, within reason, for usefulness. More and more he flooded her inmost being, drowning the old landmarks, like the sea at high tide. Nan was not a Christian, did not believe in God, but she came near at this time to believing in Christianity as possibly a fine and adventurous thing to live.
III
Echoes of the great little world so far off came to the Cornish coasts, through the Western Mercury and the stray, belated London papers. Rumours of a projected coal strike, of fighting in Mesopotamia, of political prisoners on hunger strike, of massacres in Ireland, and typists murdered at watering-places; echoes of Fleet Street quarrels, of Bolshevik gold (“Not a bond! Not a franc! Not a rouble!”) and, from the religious world, of fallen man and New Faiths for Old. And on Sundays one bought a paper which had for its special star comic turn the reminiscences of the expansive wife of one of our more patient politicians. The world went on just the same, quarrelling, chattering, lying; sentimental, busy and richly absurd; its denizens tilting against each other’s politics, murdering each other, trying and always failing to swim across the channel, and always talking, talking, talking. Marazion and Newlyn, and every other place were the world in little, doing all the same things in their own miniature way. Each human soul was the world in little, with all the same conflicts, hopes, emotions, excitements and intrigues. But Nan, swimming, sailing, eating, writing, walking and lounging, browning in salt winds and waters, was happy and remote, like a savage on an island who meditates exclusively on his own affairs.
IV
Nan met them at Penzance station. The happy three; they would be good to make holiday with. Already they had holiday faces, though not yet browned like Nan’s.
Barry’s hand gripped Nan’s. He was here then, and it had come. Her head swam; she felt light, like thistledown on the wind.
They came up from the station into quiet, gay, warm Penzance, and had tea at a shop. They were going to stay at Marazion that night and the next, and spend the day bicycling to Land’s End and back. They were all four full of vigour, brimming with life and energy that needed to be spent. But Gerda looked pale.
“She’s been overworking in a stuffy office,” Barry said. “And not, except when she dined with me, getting proper meals. What do you think she weighs, Nan?”
“About as much as that infant there,” Nan said, indicating a stout person of five at the next table.
“Just about, I daresay. She’s only six stone. What are we to do about it?”
His eyes caressed Gerda, as they might have caressed a child. He would be a delightful uncle by marriage, Nan thought.
They took the road to Marazion. The tide was going out. In front of them the Mount rose in a shallowing violet sea.
“My word!” said Barry, and Kay, screwing up his eyes, murmured, “Good old Mount.” Gerda’s lips parted in a deep breath; beauty always struck her dumb.
Into the pale-washed, straggling old village they rode, stabled their bicycles, and went down to the shining evening sands, where now the paved causeway to the Mount was all exposed, running slimy and seaweedy between rippled wet sands and dark, slippery rocks. Barefooted they trod it, Gerda and Kay in front, Barry and Nan behind, and the gulls talking and wheeling round them.
Nan stopped, the west in her eyes. “Look.”
Point beyond point they saw stretching westward to Land’s End, dim and dark beyond a rose-flushed sea.
“Isn’t it clear,” said Nan. “You can see the cliff villages ever so far along … Newlyn, Mousehole, Clement’s Island off it—and the point of Lamorna.”
Barry said “We’ll go to Land’s End by the coast road tomorrow, shan’t we, not the high road?”
“Oh, the coast road, yes. It’s about twice the distance, with the ups and downs, and you can’t ride all the way. But we’ll go by it.”
For a moment they stood side by side, looking westward over the bay.
Nan said, “Aren’t you glad you came?”
“I should say so!”
His answer came, quick and emphatic. There
