Barry did not see it. He was not looking at her, nor over the bay, but in front of him, to where Gerda, a thin little upright form, moved barelegged along the shining causeway to the moat.
Nan’s smile flickered out. The sunset tides of rose flamed swiftly over her cheeks, her neck, her body, and receded as sharply, as if someone had hit her in the face. Her pause, her smile, had been equivalent, as she saw them, to a permission, even to an invitation. He had turned away unnoticing, a queer, absent tenderness in his eyes, as they followed Gerda … Gerda … walking light-footed up the wet causeway. … Well, if he had got out of the habit of wanting to make love to her, she would not offer him chances again. When he got the habit back, he must make his own chances as best he could.
“Come on,” said Nan. “We must hurry.”
She left no more pauses, but talked all the time, about Newlyn, about the artists, about the horrid children, the fishing, the gulls, the weather.
“And how’s the book?” he asked.
“Nearly done. I’m waiting for the end to make itself.”
He smiled and looking round at him she saw that he was not smiling at her or her book, but at Gerda, who had stepped off the causeway and was wading in a rock pool.
He must be obsessed with Gerda; he thought of her, apparently, all the time he was talking about other things. It was irritating for an aunt to bear.
They joined Kay and Gerda on the island. Kay was prowling about, looking for a way by which to enter the forbidden castle. Kay always trespassed when he could, and was so courteous and gentle when he was caught at it that he disarmed comment. But this time he could not manage to evade the polite but firm eye of the fisherman on guard. They crossed over to Marazion again all together and went to the café for supper.
V
It was a merry, rowdy meal they had; ham and eggs and coffee in an upper room, with the soft sea air blowing in on them through open windows. Nan and Barry chattered, and Kay took his cheerful part; only Gerda sparse of word, was quiet and dreamy, with her blue eyes opened wide against sleep, for she had not slept until late last night.
“High time she had a holiday,” Barry said of her. “Four weeks’ grind in August—it’s beginning to tell now.”
Fussy Barry was about the child. As bad as Frances Carr with Pamela. Gerda was as strong as a little pony really, though she looked such a small, white, brittle thing.
They got out maps and schemed out roads and routes over their cigarettes. Then they strolled about the little town, exploring its alleys and narrow byways that gave on the sea. The moon had risen now, and Marazion was cut steeply in shadow and silver light, and all the bay lay in shadow and silver too, to where the lights of Penzance twinkled like a great lit church.
Barry thought once, as he had often thought in the past, “How brilliant Nan is, and how gay. No wonder she never needed me. She needs no one,” and this time it did not hurt him to think it. He loved to listen to her, to talk and laugh with her, to look at her, but he was free at last; he demanded nothing of her. Those restless, urging, disappointed hopes and longings lay dead in him, dead and at peace. He could not have put his finger on the moment of their death; there had been no moment; like good soldiers they had never died, but faded away, and till tonight he had not known that they had gone. He would show Nan now that she need fear no more pestering from him; she need not keep on talking without pause whenever they were alone together, which had been her old way of defence, and which she was beginning again now. They could drop now into undisturbed friendship. Nan was the most stimulating of friends. It was refreshing to talk things out with her again, to watch her quick mind flashing and turning and cutting its way, brilliant, clear, sharp, like a diamond.
They went to bed; Barry and Kay to the room they had got above a public house, Nan and Gerda to Nan’s room at the café, where they squeezed into one bed.
Gerda slept, lying very straight and still, as was her habit in sleep. Nan lay wakeful and restless, watching the moonlight steal across the floor and lie palely on the bed and on Gerda’s waxen face and yellow hair. The pretty, pale child, strange in sleep, like a little mermaiden lost on earth. Nan, sitting up in bed, one dark plait hanging over each shoulder, watched her with brooding amber eyes. How young she was, how very, very young. It was touching to be so young. Yet why, when youth was, people said, the best time? It wasn’t really touching to be young; it was touching not to be young, because you had less of life left. Touching to be thirty; more touching to be forty; tragic to be fifty and heartbreaking to be sixty. As to seventy, as to eighty, one would feel as one did during the last dance of a ball, tired but fey in the paling dawn, desperately making the most of each bar of music before one went home to bed. That was touching; Mrs. Hilary and Grandmama were touching. Not Gerda and Kay, with their dance just beginning.
A bore, this sharing one bed. You couldn’t sleep, however small and quiet your companion lay. They must get a bed each, when they could, during this tour. One must sleep. If one didn’t one began to think. Every time Nan forced herself to the edge of
