Gerda refused to do so mean a thing. She had her own sense of honour, and believed that everyone should carry his or her own burden. But when they had to get off and walk up the hill she let him help to push her bicycle.
“Give us a few days, Nan,” said Barry, “and we’ll all be as fit as you. At present we’re fat and scant of breath from our sedentary and useful life.”
“Our life”—as if they had only the one between them.
At Newlyn Nan stopped. She said she was going to supper with someone there and would come on later. She was, in fact, tired of them. She dropped into Stephen Lumley’s studio, which was, as usual after painting hours, full of his friends, talking and smoking. That was the only way to spend the evening, thought Nan, talking and smoking and laughing, never pausing. Anyhow that was the way she spent it.
She got back to Marazion at ten o’clock and went to her room at the little café. Looking from its window, she saw the three on the shore by the moonlit sea. Kay was standing on the paved causeway, and Barry and Gerda, some way off, were wading among the rocks, bending over the pools, as if they were looking for crabs.
Nan went to bed. When Gerda came in presently, she lay very still and pretended to be asleep.
It was dreadful, another night of sharing a bed. Dreadful to lie so close one to the other; dreadful to touch accidentally; touching people reminded you how alive they are, with their separate, conscious throbbing life so close against yours.
II
Next morning they took the road eastward. They were going to ride along the coast to Talland Bay, where they were going to spend a week. They were giving themselves a week to get there, which would allow plenty of time for bathing by the way. It is no use hurrying in Cornwall, the hills are too steep and the sea too attractive, and lunch and tea, when ordered in shops, so long in coming. The first day they only got round the Lizard to Cadgwith, where they dived from steep rocks into deep blue water. Nan dived from a high rock with a swoop like a sea bird’s, a pretty thing to watch. Barry was nearly as good; he too was physically proficient. The Bendishes were less competent; they were so much younger, as Barry said. But they too reached the water head first, which is, after all, the main thing in diving. And as often as Nan dived, with her arrowy swoop, Gerda tumbled in too, from the same rock, and when Nan climbed a yet higher rock and dived again, Gerda climbed too, and fell in sprawling after her. Gerda today was not to be outdone, anyhow in will to attempt, whatever her achievement might lack. Nan looked up from the sea with a kind of mocking admiration at the little figure poised on the high shelf of rock, slightly unsteady about the knees, slightly blue about the lips, thin white arms pointing forward for the plunge.
The child had pluck. … It must have hurt, too, that slap on the nearly flat body as she struck the sea. She hadn’t done it well. She came up with a dazed look, shaking the water out of her eyes, coughing.
“You’re too ambitious,” Barry told her. “That was much too high for you. You’re also blue with cold. Come out.”
Gerda looked up at Nan, who was scrambling nimbly onto the highest ledge of all, crying “I must have one more.”
Barry said to Gerda “No, you’re not going after her. You’re coming out. It’s no use thinking you can do all Nan does. None of us can.”
Gerda gave up. The pace was too hard for her. She couldn’t face that highest rock; the one below had made her feel cold and queer and shaky as she stood on it. Besides, why was she trying, for the first time in her life, to go Nan’s pace, which had always been, and was now more than ever before, too hot and mettlesome for her? She didn’t know why; only that Nan had been, somehow, all day setting the pace, daring her, as it were, to make it. It was becoming, oddly, a point of honour between them, and neither knew how or why.
III
On the road it was the same. Nan, with only the faintest, if any application of brakes, would commit herself to lanes which leaped precipitously downwards like mountain streams, zigzagging like a dog’s-tooth pattern, shingled with loose stones, whose unseen end might be a village round some sharp turn, or a cove by the sea, or a field path running to a farm, or merely the foot of one hill and the beginning of the steep pull up the next. Coast roads in Cornwall are like that—often uncertain in their ultimate goal (for map-makers, like bicyclists, are apt to get tired of them, and, tiring, break them off, so to speak, in midair, leaving them suspended, like snapped ends of string). But however uncertain their goal may be, their form is not uncertain at all; it can be relied on to be that of a snake in agony leaping down a hill or up; or, if one prefers it, that of a corkscrew plunging downwards into a cork.
Nan leaped and plunged with them. She was at the bottom while the others were still jolting, painfully brake-held, albeit rapidly, halfway down. And sometimes, when the slope was more than usually like the steep roof of a house, the zigzags more than usually acute, the end even less than usually known, the whole situation, in short, more dreadful and perilous, if possible, than usual, the others surrendered, got off and walked. They couldn’t really rely on their brakes to hold
