Gerda said with chattering teeth, as she and Nan dressed in their rocky corner, “I suppose, Nan, if it hadn’t been for you and Barry, I’d have drowned.”
“Well, I suppose perhaps you would. If you come to think of it, we’d most of us be dying suddenly half the time if it weren’t for something—some chance or other.”
Gerda said “Thanks awfully, Nan,” in her direct, childlike way, and Nan turned it off with “You might have thanked me if you had drowned, seeing it was my fault we bathed there at all. I ought to have known it wasn’t safe for you or Kay.”
Looking at the little fragile figure shivering in its vest, Nan felt in that moment no malice, no triumph, no rivalry, no jealous anger; nothing but the protecting care for the smaller and weaker, for Neville’s little pretty, precious child that she had felt when Gerda’s hand clutched her shoulder in the sea.
“Lifesaving seems to soften the heart,” she reflected, grimly, conscious as always of her own reactions.
“Well,” said Kay weakly, as they climbed up the cliff path to the little village, “I do call that a rotten bathe. Now let’s make for the pub and drink whiskey.”
VII
It was three days later. They had spent an afternoon and a night at Polperro, and the sun shone in the morning on that incredible place as they rode out of it after breakfast. Polperro shakes the soul and the aesthetic nerves like a glass of old wine; no one can survey it unmoved, or leave it as he entered it, any more than you can come out of a fairy ring as you went in. In the afternoon they had bathed in the rock pools along the coast. In the evening the moon had magically gleamed on the little town, and Barry and Gerda had sat together on the beach watching it, and then in the dawn they had risen (Barry and Gerda again) and rowed out in a boat to watch the pilchard haul, returning at breakfast time sleepy, fishy and bright-eyed.
As they climbed the steep hill path that leads to Talland, the sun danced on the little harbour with its fishing-boats and its sad, crowding, crying gulls, and on the huddled white town with its narrow crooked streets and overhanging houses: Polperro had the eerie beauty of a dream or of a little foreign port. Such beauty and charm are on the edge of pain; you cannot disentangle them from it. They intoxicate, and pierce to tears. The warm morning sun sparkled on a still blue sea, and burned the gorse and bracken by the steep path’s edge to fragrance. So steep the path was that they had to push their bicycles up it with bent backs and labouring steps, so narrow that they had to go in single file. It was never meant for cyclists, only for walkers; the bicycling road ran far inland.
They reached the cliff’s highest point, and looked down on Talland Bay. By the side of the path, on a grass plateau, a stone war-cross reared grey against a blue sky, with its roll of names, and its comment—“True love by life, true love by death is tried. …”
The path, become narrower, rougher and more winding, plunged sharply, steeply downwards, running perilously along the cliff’s edge. Nan got on her bicycle.
Barry called from the rear, “Nan! It can’t be done! It’s not rideable. … Don’t be absurd.”
Nan, remarking casually “It’ll be rideable if I ride it,” began to do so.
“Madwoman,” Barry said, and Kay assured him, “Nan’ll be all right. No one else would, but she’s got nine lives, you know.”
Gerda came next behind Nan. For a moment she paused, dubiously, watching Nan’s flying, brakeless progress down the wild ribbon of a footpath, between the hill and the sea. A false swerve, a failure to turn with the path, and one would fly off the cliff’s edge into space, fall down perhaps to the blue rock pools far below.
To refuse Nan’s lead now would be to fail again in pluck and skill before Barry. “My word, Nan, you’re a sportsman!” Barry had said, coughing weakly on the rock onto which Nan had dragged them all out of the sea. That phrase, and the ring in his hoarse voice as he said it, had stayed with Gerda.
She got onto her bicycle, and shot off down the precipitous path.
“My God!” It was Barry’s voice again, from the rear. “Stop, Gerda … oh, you little fool. … Stop. …”
But it was too late for Gerda to stop then if she had tried. She was in full career, rushing, leaping, jolting over the gorse roots under the path, past thought and past hope and oddly past fear, past anything but the knowledge that what Nan did she too must do.
Strangely, inaptly, the line of verse she had just read sung itself in her mind as she rushed.
“True love by life, true love by death is tried. …”
She took the first sharp turn, and the second. The third, a right angle bending inward from the cliff’s very edge, she did not take. She dashed on instead, straight into space, like a young Phoebus riding a horse of the morning through the blue air.
VIII
Nan, far ahead, nearly on the level, heard the crash and heard voices crying out. Jamming on her brakes she jumped off; looked back up the precipitous path; saw nothing but its windings. She left her bicycle at the path’s side and turned and ran up. Rounding a sharp bend, she saw them at last above her; Barry and Kay scrambling furiously down the side of the cliff, and below them, on a ledge halfway down to the sea, a tangled heap that was Gerda and her bicycle.
The next turn of
