“I shall sleep like the dead here,” I thought, as I began to unpack my baggage.
Dinner found me very ready to enjoy everything, and in a mood to talk nonsense to Norah and the two children. The salle-à-manger was fairly full, and the people were English, Belgian or French “Quite a nice crowd,” according to Jamie—“not too beastly rich. We have made quite a lot of friends.” Our table was in the middle of the room, and they had given me a chair where I faced the windows and could look out over the sea. A series of small tables were ranged next to the windows, and they were the favoured places presented to the Leopold’s longest stayers. I noticed a girl sitting by herself in a corner at one of these little tables. She was very dark and very pale, and not English. Her face interested me. It had a slightly bewildered look, and the eyes were sad.
Pauline and Phœbe were telling me the names of half the people in the room.
“That’s Miss Ferguson.”
“And that’s Major Iles, the purple one.”
“Ssh!” said Norah.
“It’s all right,” Jamie interposed, “Iles is attacking his soup.”
“And that’s Ma’mselle Merville. Isn’t she pretty?”
“Which one?” I asked.
“She—in the corner.”
“Don’t point!” said Norah.
“I think she looks rather sad.”
Hamilton frowned slightly.
“I don’t blame her for that,” he said.
The weather was all that a man could desire, and I spent the next two days romping with the Hamiltons, or rather, with Phœbe and Pauline. They took me in hand; they flicked and teased and laughed the last shreds of worldly seriousness out of me, and I became an irresponsible creature who bathed and basked in the sun, and ran races, and put ten-centime pieces on a flat stone for two young women to shy at. I felt better than I had felt for years, and I went in to my meals like a ploughboy.
But there was one serious note in that big, sunny room with its chattering voices and clatter of knives and forks. My eyes were always being drawn to the Belgian girl who sat alone in the corner. She seemed so much aloof; she never appeared to speak to anybody, though she would smile across to Phœbe and Pauline. I had a feeling that she was not only sad and lonely, but that the money was not too plentiful, and the longer I watched her the more I began to wonder what her history was.
“Why don’t you ask Mademoiselle Merville to play with you?” I asked Pauline.
“Do—you—want to play with her?” retorted that disconcerting young woman.
The laugh was against me.
“She looks lonely,” I said.
“But she won’t play,” Phoebe told me; “she’s awfully sweet, but she doesn’t seem able to play.”
“Have you tried?”
“Of course we’ve tried; but Mumsie told us not to be nuisances. Do you find us nuisances, Uncle Mayne?”
“Oh, not at all,” said I.
That evening in a corner of the smoking-room, while Jamie and I were snatching half an hour’s peace with our pipes before the Leopold’s weekly dance, I asked him about the pale girl in the corner.
“Do you know anything about her?”
He gave me a quizzical look.
“Interested?”
“A bit. She has such a lost look.”
“Well, I do know something about her; half the hotel knows it. A most tragic thing happened to her early in the war.”
“Over here?”
“No, she was in England at the time, learning the language. Her people lived at Brussels, quite wealthy people. The whole family was wiped out.”
“Good heavens! How?”
“That is the strange part of it; nobody knows.”
“Nobody knows!”
“Sounds absurd, doesn’t it? All that the girl ever discovered was that her people and another family left Brussels in two cars. It was at the time of the stampede. They were supposed to be making for this place or for the frontier along the coast.”
He paused to relight his pipe, and in that moment of silence I had a most extraordinary feeling of inward attention. I seemed to know what he was going to tell me, that I knew more about it than he did.
“Well?” I said.
“They simply disappeared, vanished. They were never heard of again.”
“What—the two families?”
“Yes. They and their cars and their luggage.”
“It sounds impossible. But what is the theory?”
“There is no theory. The only thing I can think of is that they fell in somewhere with some German scouting party, some particularly unpleasant party. Oh, well, the men had had drink. All sorts of things happened. We were told so, weren’t we? Men were apt to become savages.”
“You mean—they were butchered?”
“Perhaps.”
“But surely——?”
“Not a trace. And it turned out to be more than a mere tragedy of the affections. The girl lost everything—or nearly everything. Her father took some documents with him. I don’t know anything about the Belgian law, but apparently another side of the family came in for the property. There had been bad feeling, a sort of feud; anyhow, with certain documents missing, the other crowd got all the estate.”
I said nothing for a moment; I was too conscious of a tense feeling of excitement.
“I wish you could introduce me to Mademoiselle Merville.”
“Of course I will.”
“To-night?”
“I’ll try. I warn you—she is rather elusive.”
We knocked out our pipes and went into the lounge. The orchestra had begun to play in the room where the dance was held, and Pauline and Phœbe, who were on the jig with their small feet, made a rush at me.
“Oh, Uncle Mayne, do come and dance with us.”
“Mumsie says we may stay up for an hour.”
Hamilton suppressed them, but quite gently.
“You run along—you two—and begin. You haven’t hired Uncle Mayne for the fortnight.”
He had seen Mademoiselle Merville sitting alone in a corner of the lounge, and he went across, bowed, and spoke to her. She looked startled; she glanced at me. For a moment I thought that she was going to refuse, and then she smiled faintly, and made a slight movement of the head. Hamilton beckoned, and I crossed over.
“Mr. Richard Mayne—Mademoiselle Lucie Merville.”
Hamilton left us and I sat down beside her. She was in black, and it emphasized her pallor and the darkness of her eyes. They were very troubled eyes, and they made me think of her as someone who had never quite recovered from some shock, and who was still bewildered by it. I felt that she was a woman who had to be spoken to very gently. She left the conversation to me, and she listened as though the real Lucie was somewhere far away. I talked about Ostend, the life here, the children.
Her eyes brightened when I brought in Phœbe and Pauline.
“They are dears,” she said.
She spoke English very well, and it gave me an opening.
“You were at school in England, were you not?”
“Yes.”
“You must have lived in England quite a long while.”
She gave me a queer and almost frightened look.
“Yes.”
“During the war?”
For a moment I thought that I had touched with too great a boldness on a matter that was painful to her. Her eyes darkened; I had a feeling that she was about to make some excuse and escape.
“Perhaps you do not care to talk of the war. I am sorry.”
There must have been some sympathy between us, and perhaps she felt that subtle something, an attraction that drew us together.
“People were very kind to me in England. I shall never forget.”
“Oh, well,” I said; “the war drew us all together. Don’t talk about it if you do not wish to.”
“I think that depends.”
“You made friends in England?”
“Yes.
”
“Do you ever go over?”
“No.”
There was a pause. We looked at each other rather like two shy children.
“What part of England did you stay in?”
“I spent most of my time in Surrey.”
“Surrey!”
“Yes, near a little village called Milford. Some people were very good to me there.”
I felt something flash in my brain.
“Not the Millards?” I said.
I saw the surprise in her eyes.
“Why—yes; how did you know?”
“I did not know. But I have just been staying with them. They are very old friends of mine.”
We were silent a moment. A faint smile seemed to be playing about her mouth; her thoughts had gone back.
“They were very dear people; they were very kind to me. They gave me a home when I was in very great trouble. It was such a peaceful house, so good.”
It came into my mind that there was one question I wanted to ask her.
“Tell me, did you have that quaint little room with the window looking down over the lawn to the woods?”
Again she looked surprised.
“Yes. It had purple curtains and a greyish carpet, and early in the morning you heard the birds singing.”
I was amazed. She had slept in that room in which I had dreamed my dream, and as I realised it and the almost frightening significance of it I became aware of thoughts that were uncanny. What if her dead had been trying to communicate with her and had failed, while I—a casual stranger—had dreamed of the thing—seen it—years after it had happened. I remembered the curious way in which the room had affected me.
“A most queer coincidence,” I said, “that you and I should meet here.”
I told her nothing of my dream, or hinted at my sudden conjecturing as to whether our meeting in this Ostend hotel was not more than a coincidence. It seemed to me that I—a tired and overworked business man—had had an attack of clairvoyance, but what was more suggestive was my realization of what I had to do. The dune country lay out there, and my dream seemed more vivid than ever. Was it possible that I might find some wild spot in the dunes where my dream would fit like a picture into its frame?
I led the talk away to other things, but before I went to bed that night I got hold of Jamie Hamilton, and told him the whole tale. I could see that he was mildly incredulous, but that at the same time he was quite ready to join in something that had the lure of an adventure.
“Well, what are you going to do?”
“Tramp the dune country.”
“What, all the way from here to Dunkirk?”
“Not so far as that. They would not have got beyond Nieuport, you know.”
“My dear chap!” he said, looking at me as though he thought that I had tumbled too easily into a pit of superstitious foolishness.
“Of course you need not come.”
“Oh, I’ll come. I’ve got an inquiring mind. But I suppose you have said nothing to the girl?”
“Not a word. It would be rather cruel unless I had some proof to give her.”
So Hamilton and I set out next morning to explore the country of the dunes, pretending that we intended to visit some of the old places we had known during the war. We took our lunch with us, and engaged a car to run us out and wait for us. It was a blazing day, with the sea like a mirror and the sand like pale brass, and anyone who has tried to march over loose, sun-warmed sand will tell you that it can be an exhausting and exasperating form of exercise. And, of course, we found nothing that we could point to or identify. One sand dune is much like another, and we tramped that tossed and desolate land-sea, getting very hot and tired, and towards the end of the day Hamilton grew slightly tense and facetious. He had sweated all the sense of adventure out of his long, lean body. Our shoes were full of sand. The glare and the heat of it beat up into our faces.
“Say, old thing, what about getting home for a drink and a bathe?”
I felt disgruntled and a little touchy.
“Yes, it’s the wrong atmosphere.”
“It’s a damned hot one, anyway. The next time you dream a dream, Toby, I’d insist on having a notice board put up.”
We picked up the car and drove back to Ostend, where Jamie went to cool himself in the sea, while I sat in my bedroom examining a map that I had bought. “System is the thing,” I reflected. “I ought to go over the ground systematically, bit by bit. I ought to get the feel of the place, and to do that I must go alone.”
I spent an hour that evening talking to Lucie Merville, feeling more and more attracted by her, and ignoring Hamilton’s suggestion that I should come and play bridge. He was wilfully and wickedly tactless in pretending that I was needed to make up a four. I kept my chair beside Lucie Merville. I had a feeling that she liked me, that she felt at ease with me, and I wanted her to like me. In fact I began to suspect that I wanted much more than that. She appealed to me, as a certain particular woman appeals to a certain man, not for any tangible and purely physical reason, but because there seemed to be some mysterious vibration that we shared. Love is like life; you can analyse its characteristics, but you cannot create it.
We talked about the Millards, and the next day I was out again among the dunes, tramping, watching, trying to discover some familiar undulations, some stretch of sand that might make me feel that I had seen it before. But the dunes baffled me, and after three consecutive days of such sand-slogging, I was thoroughly discouraged and tempted to give up. Hamilton’s quizzical face met me at the dinner-table each evening, and the family was beginning to wonder what morose sort of creature I must be to disappear daily with my lunch stowed away in an old haversack.
“Mayne goes botanizing,” said Hamilton, with a wicked look; “you did not know he was a botanist, did you?”
I felt tired and exasperated, but an hour’s talk with Lucie Merville rested me and put me in such a happy temper that I saw myself going out again on the morrow on the same wild quest. I went. The weather had changed. The sky and the sea were overcast, and I felt that rain was coming on the wings of the west wind. Wayward gleams of pale sunlight touched the dunes, and when my chauffeur put me down and I wandered away towards the Yser I had a curious feeling of being in familiar country. The whole atmosphere had changed. I seemed to be re-entering the atmosphere of my dream, for I remembered the clouds, the pale sunlight, the grey blue distances of approaching rain.
I wandered about among the sandhills; but, in spite of my strange feeling of expectancy, I found nothing that could guide me. The sky grew more solidly grey. I turned a little towards the sea and began to climb a sort of hummocky ridge which spread out in an undulating plateau. I stood there looking over the tumbled landscape, and suddenly—something happened.
I was looking over my left shoulder, and I saw something white flash up in the near distance. It was a tall and rather narrow house with a white gable, lit by a passing gleam of sunlight. It was the house that I had seen in my dream.
I stood and stared. There were one or two figures moving about the house.
I felt a shiver pass down my spine; my knees were tremulous; I looked about me with a sense of awe and of fear.
Within three yards of me rose a bank of sand. It undulated slightly, showed little hummocks and hollows.
I turned to the right. Yes; there was a sort of sandy terrace here of pale, crisp sand.
Yes; but there was nothing else to be seen.
And then I remembered that in this dune country the sand was blown by the wind; it collected against solid objects and covered them.
My sense of fear passed into action. I bent down and began to scrape at one of the hummocks on the sloping bank. I must have scraped away six inches of sand when my fingers touched something hard.
I drew up and back. I stared. I was sweating, and the feeling of fear had returned.
Then, I knelt down and made myself go on with the job. A black thing came into view. It was a man
’s boot, but a man’s boot by itself had no significance. It was the thing that the boot covered that mattered.
I knelt, staring at two white sticks that disappeared into the top of the boot. They were the two shin-bones of a skeleton.
THE FIRST WRINKLE
The daily details of life had begun to bore Wilton Carr.
At half-past four his secretary brought in his tea—China tea and buttered toast. She seated herself in the chair on the other side of his desk, her shorthand pad ready, her pince-nez tilted attentively. She, too, was a machine—an automaton that went through the same actions at the same hour each day. Her life never seemed to vary; it was as plain and as uninteresting and as obvious as her face.
“No letters to-night, Miss Sims.”
She was surprised, and her surprise amazed him. He knew that for the last ten years he had dictated his letters to her while he was drinking his tea. Hundreds of thousands of letters—dull letters that he had come to associate with the glimmer of her pince-nez and her thin and dusty face!
“No letters, sir?”
There seemed to be some hitch in the machinery of life. She knew that there were a dozen letters that were waiting to be answered, and that Wilton Carr’s whole career had preached punctuality, patience, routine. There had been days when she could have screamed as her pencil jabbed its way across the paper. Had he ever suspected? Did this man of forty know what it was to have to live two lives?
She rose, and the telephone on his desk twittered.
“Hold on,” he said.
She waited, watching his face, vaguely aware of a change in it that she could not describe. There were little, irritable wrinkles on his forehead and round his eyes. She knew how she felt and how she looked when she was irritable with fatigue and hunger, and Wilton Carr’s face made her wonder whether he was hungry, and if so—for what?
He was speaking into the telephone.
“What? Oh, it’s Rigby & Harden again, is it? Tell them to go to hell!”
She saw his nostrils twitching, and the impatience in his eyes.
“Yes—that’s what I said. Wait, I’ll send them a letter. I’m tired of their slipping ways.”
He rang off, gulped a mouthful of tea, and glanced at Miss Sims.
The Short Stories of Warwick Deeping Page 20
