Along the edge of the cliffs, high above these scenes, Finch and Arthur were carrying baskets for the first picnic on the shore. Behind them, so that it was necessary for them to wait every little while in order that she might overtake them, came Sarah. She glided empty-handed on the smooth turf, frequently pausing, on the very edge of the cliff, to look below.
“Do be careful, Sarah!” Leigh would cry, in sudden fright. “Don’t you see how dangerous it is? One slip, and you’d be flying down that precipice!”
For a time she would be careful, but soon again she would be hovering like a seabird on the edge of the cliff. She seldom spoke, but once she pointed across the sea and said—“Over there is Ireland.”
The youths felt so full of life that they would have liked to run up and down the sweeping roll of the downs. But there was Sarah to be waited for, watched over. In all his aching curiosity about her, Finch discovered no slightest change in her attitude either toward himself or Arthur since her marriage. She spoke in the same sweet, almost inaudible tone. She listened to their conversations and laughter in silence. Occasionally, Finch fancied, she threw him a look of evasion. At times Arthur showed an almost agonised desire to understand her. At other times, he appeared to strive to ignore her and to delight in the presence of Finch. His attitude towards her was at once protecting and tormented because of his inability to draw near to her.
Her most urgent need seemed to be, as before her marriage, the need for solitude. Finch could not help recalling Mrs. Court’s nicknames of Mouse and Mole. But, as the month drew on, she had moments of wild gaiety. This was evinced, not by laughter or movement, but by change of expression. Her look of detachment would vanish and her aspect become one of untamed joy in wind and sea.
Although so often they must wait for her as she glided over the smooth undulations of the downs, it was she who urged that they go on and on, always seeming to see in the cliff just beyond, the perfect view, the perfect place for rest. At last, on the tallest cliff, on the one that pressed farthest out to sea, she stopped and, taking the red shawl from Arthur, spread it for herself on the grass. He and Finch set down their baskets and stretched themselves at full length. No bathers were visible here, only, far below, a man was leading a plunging team across a stony ridge cast up by the sea to where he would fill his waggon with stones for building. The stamp of hooves, the rattle of rolling stones, rose sharply above the languorous wash of the midsummer sea.
Finch lay still, listening. He felt the magnetic draw of the dark cliff beneath him. He felt the vibration of the sea through the interminable congregation of rock and earth and subterranean spring that formed it. He watched the seagulls like wind-tossed lilies drift above him. He felt conscious of the beating of the hearts of his companions. Like the beat of an advancing tide he felt their nearness. He remembered what Arthur had said about their love being clear and bright... a three-pointed star... He wished that he could put the thought of Sarah from him.
After a while Arthur began to unpack the basket. He was eager to see what the cook had given them. He set out the plate of sandwiches, the tomatoes, the cakes, the box of raspberries, the bowl of Cornish cream. Finch had carried some bottles of Somerset ale.
“I’ll be hanged,” ejaculated Leigh, “if we haven’t forgotten the opener. How are we going to open the ale?”
“I’ll knock the heads off the bottles,” answered Finch blithely.
He crept to the edge of the cliff, carrying a bottle, and peered over the side. The dark plane of shale and slate swept down into the black shadow of a cave guarded by jagged pinnacles of rock. What would it be like, he wondered, to drop over the edge of the cliff, end all, discover all, in one brief moment. He saw himself sinking, not plunging, downward, into the translucent greenness of forward-sliding waves. Ah, but it should be done at high tide, not to fall on those black pinnacles!
Arthur’s voice recalled him. “What’s the matter, Finch? Can’t you find a rock to hit it on?”
Finch struck the neck of the bottle on a sharp projection. A swirl of small birds rose from the face of the cliff. Foam spurted over his hand and spattered his face. He returned to the others, grinning. Flakes of foam made his grin ridiculous. Arthur shouted with laughter but Sarah said coldly:
“You have cut your wrist.” She took her handkerchief and pressed it on the cut.
“Oh, I’m sorry, old man!” exclaimed Leigh. He filled three glasses with the ale.
“It’s nothing,” muttered Finch. He sat very still, as Sarah bound the handkerchief about his wrist, his nerves strangely aquiver.
“It’s too small,” she said. “Look, the blood is coming through!”
“Don’t ask me to look,” said Leigh hastily. “The sight of blood makes me sick.”
“It doesn’t me,” said his wife. “I like it.”
Leigh gave her a horrified look. “Sarah! You don’t know what you are saying, darling.”
“Yes, I do! It stirs something in me.”
“What sort of something?”
“Old and fierce and wicked.”
Leigh gave a forced laugh. “Take your hand away from her, Finch. She’s dangerous!”
She put the hand away from her. “Finch understands.”
“Do you, Finch?”
“I think I do.”
“Explain then. She frightens me.”
“I can’t explain.”
“Why?”
“It’s just a feeling.”
“Well, I’ll explain for you. You’re both Courts, and you have the same bloodthirsty old ancestors behind you.”
Down below the man had loaded his waggon with stones. The horses were struggling across the stony ridge with it. They plunged, with scraping, clattering hooves and straining flanks. Patches of sweat appeared on their heaving sides. The man, cracking his whip, stumbled beside them. One of them stumbled, fell, was up again. In a last savage and despairing effort they dragged the load over the ridge, across the shingle, and halted on the grassy sward. For a few moments they relaxed, the horses with drooping heads, the man nursing a strained elbow.
The three on the sunny cliff-side reclined watching the scene below in silence. Delicate spirals of smoke curled above their heads. The white clothes of the young men and the red of the shawl on which Sarah sat were very distinct to the driver of the team when he raised his eyes in their direction. The tide advanced murmurously in a long rippling line, its advance scarcely perceptible until it gained some new outpost of the shore.
“What a pity,” said Leigh, “that we have no bathing suits! We must buy some in the town.”
After that they went bathing almost every day, the limbs of Arthur and Finch turning a ruddy brown, and Sarah’s coffee colour. She bought a black bathing cap that fitted closely about her face, so that it looked like a strange pale flower appearing from its dark sheath. They had almost to carry her down the steep steps cut in the rock. She relaxed in their arms ike a young child, seeming to give no thought to the difficulty of the descent. The cave was assigned to her for a chamber while they undressed in a sand-strewn crevice of the cliff. Then she must be guided among the small sharp rocks jutting from the sand. Finch cast a shy look at her legs, wondering that she was not able to make better use of them. They were thin but shapely. When she was safely on the sands, that gleamed like wet brown satin, she glided at her accustomed pace to the surf. The sea looked far away, glancing in the sunlight, tossing up its foam, singing to itself. The footprints of the three slowly filled with water. Then suddenly they were in the sea. They took hands and danced up and down. They splashed and were half blinded in the translucent singing world of the waves. Sarah fell and they caught her up, holding her in their wet arms, expecting her to scream, to be joyously frightened, but she lay in their arms as she had lain when they carried her down the steps in the cliff. They left her and dashed forward breasting the waves. When she was left she lay down on the rim of the foam, letting it wash over her.
On calm days they tried
to teach her to swim. Obediently she made the strokes, as they commanded, but the moment they relinquished their hold of her she sank.
“There is no use in trying, my angel!” cried Leigh. “You’ll never be a swimmer!”
“If I could find a proper place,” she replied, “I think I could.”
One day, when they had swam out farther than usual, they returned to find the shore empty.
“God in Heaven!” chattered Leigh, turning ghastly. “She is drowned!”
Beside themselves with fright they ran up and down the shore looking for her, shouting her name. “Sarah! Sarah! Oh, my darling!”
Between their shouts they heard a faint answer. They flew shoreward from where the sound came. They found her in a large tranquil pool, made tepid by the sun, swimming round and round.
“I knew I could do it,” she said, “if only you would let me be.”
Mole! Mouse! Ignoble Fish! Crafty Crab! They hurled these names at her.
They lay on hot slabs of rock to dry themselves.
“But I cannot lie down with nothing under me,” objected Sarah.
“Darling,” cried Arthur, “that rock is as hot as blazes! You couldn’t possibly take cold.”
“I’d like my shawl, please,” returned his wife.
“I’ll get it,” said Finch. He made the ascent to the top of the cliff and found the shawl. He stood motionless, for a moment, holding the shawl in his arms then he buried his face against it, kissing it.
“That was nice of you,” said Sarah, when he had spread it on a rock for her. And he knew, by the fleeting malice of her smile, that she had seen him on the cliff-top.
When it was too cold to bathe they built a fire of driftwood in a sheltered coign of the cliff and boiled a kettle for tea. It was at these times only that Sarah attempted to give any assistance. She would stand sheltering the fire from the wind with her shawl until it began to crackle and the flames lick about the kettle. They would sit smoking, while Leigh talked happily, watching the sun sink into the sea, cloud-flakes, like a flock of butterflies, drifting above it.
As the sultry days passed their gaiety was tempered by pensiveness which grew into a faint melancholy, making them sit silent in each other’s company feeling troubled, they knew not why.
Toward the end of the month they were caught in a sudden squall. It was a Sunday, and there were many people abroad. In order to escape these they walked to a point more distant than any they had reached before. They sat on the brow of a cliff enjoying the new view of headland beyond rocky headland stretching northward. Vast cloud formations were reared like cities gilded and glorified by the sun’s splendour, then were disintegrated, dissolved before their eyes, leaving the sky a tranquil arch of unbroken blue.
The sun went down, a flaming red sphere whose colour was reflected in a thousand varying tints by clouds and wisps of vapour, by long, slow-moving waves, by swift ripples that crisped along the sand, by the ripples set in the sand itself, by pools left by the tide, by streamers and thick clumps of seaweed, by the jagged surface of the cliffs, by the rounded smoothness of pebbles, by the delicate hollows of shells, by the wings of birds, by the fleeces of sheep, by the faces of the girl and boys on the cliff. From the moment when the sun’s lower rim had touched the horizon he had transformed the world into an embroidered tapestry for his couch.
The squall, the driving rain, were on them before they had time to do more than collect their belongings and run to the shelter of a hedge. They huddled together while wind and rain beat on them. Nearby a flock of sheep took shelter.
When the worst was over they set out on the walk back, wet but rather exhilarated by the experience. The twilight was silvered by rain. Dense clumps of furze loomed black as pools before them. They ran down the long slopes of the downs with Sarah between them. She ran, as she walked, with a peculiar gliding motion that left her upper part immobile. Finch had the fancy that she was on wheels and that he and Arthur were drawing her. His nerves were intensely alive.
As they were passing through a gap in a high hedge, they made out the figures of two people who had found shelter there. They did not seem to be in a hurry to leave the shelter. The woman lay with her head toward the hedge, and the man, raised on his elbow, beside her. They were oblivious of the three who were passing. Finch saw the bulk of the man’s shoulders and the movement of his arm as he caressed the woman. They were shadows thrown against a wall of rain. The woman half sat up. The man’s head, bent above her, was as motionless as the head of a gargoyle on a church tower. She sank back.
“Heavens, what a night!” exclaimed Leigh, when they had passed through the gap. “What a night, and what a place for love!”
“I can think of worse nights—and worse places,” said Sarah.
“I wish we were back at Penholme. It’s a long way yet.”
“Have you my shawl safe, Arthur?”
“I have it, and it’s as safe as anything is.”
He spoke crisply, feeling suddenly irritated by her, irritated by Finch, by the rain that was trickling down his neck.
Finch thought of the two by the hedge. They must be soaked through, but they would be unaware of the discomfort. They were lying there wounded, shot through by the fire of love. The man’s head had been still as the upraised head of a snake about to sting. The woman had been supine as a snake basking in the sun. They were natural, that’s what they were. People weren’t intended to go into houses, to hide themselves away from the rain and the blown spray of the sea. He gloried in it wetting his cheeks, plastering his hair on his forehead. For the first time in his life he gloried in his maleness, feeling it strong and untamed and bitter within him. He gloried in the feel of Sarah’s fingers caught in his, clinging to him for support and guidance, in the jolt of their bodies together as they passed over a rough bit of ground. He felt a creeping antipathy for Arthur. It crept through him like a slow fire through grass, sending a choking feeling like smoke through his being. He would like to order Arthur to go on alone, to leave Sarah and himself together. They would crouch somewhere together, watching the stormclouds disperse and the young moon show through. They would search for the reflection of its crescent in each other’s eyes... He would kiss the raindrops from her face. He would know what it was like to be kissed by her... Heavy hatred for Arthur surged through him. He was afraid of himself. Afraid of what the storm and the sight of those two in the hedge had done to his mind... He remembered Arthur’s saying—“You are both Courts. You have the same ancestors behind you.” That must be the explanation of something wild in them both... If only he might talk to Sarah alone!
He was not watching where he was going. He stepped into the opening of a burrow, hidden in grass, and fell headlong, almost dragging the others with him. When he gathered himself up he found that his ankle was strained. He could walk no farther. He sat down on a low crumbling wall and nursed his ankle. The rain was ceasing and the faces of Sarah and Arthur were pale discs in the glimmering moonlight.
“You must stay here while I go and fetch a car,” Arthur said in a flat voice. He felt no sympathy for Finch’s suffering, only irritation. The three had been isolated too long in each other’s company.
“Sarah will wait with you.” He was glad to leave Sarah behind, to put down the heavy basket on the wall beside her. He set off gloomily toward the blurred lights of the town below.
They listened to the soft suck of his retreating steps. Sarah took her shawl from the basket and wrapped it round her. Finch forgot the ache in his ankle. Her nearness, the consciousness that they were shut in by the walls of the night, was a pain that obliterated all others.
She said: “This is like it used to be—in the garden.”
“It’s not at all like it was there.”
“Why isn’t it?
“Because now I’m mad about you.”
“And you weren’t then?”
“I don’t know Perhaps I was. But I didn’t realise it. Now it’s too late.”
�
��I’ve loved you all along. From the first day you played my accompaniments.”
“Sarah!” His voice broke. He tried to see her face. “You loved me, and married Arthur!”
“You did not ask me.”
“You didn’t give me time.”
“You never made a sign. You say yourself that this is different—that you don’t know what your feelings were then.”
“But you! You knew yours!”
“What could I do?”
“Couldn’t you have made a sign? Don’t women let men know? Never once—never once did you give me any intimation that you cared for me!”
“I met you almost every night in the garden. You knew I was deceiving my aunt.”
“But a word—a look! You were as cold as ice! I don’t believe you love me! You just want to torture me.” He buried his face in his hands.
“I love you more than you love me.”
He gave a bitter laugh. “What do you know of love? Marrying one man—loving another!”
“What do you know? It’s new to you. It’s partly the night. The storm. Those lovers we saw. You’re excited.”
“You’re as cold as ice. As cruel. And what a shame for Arthur—if what you say is true!”
“He need not know”
“He will know. He’s too sensitive not to find you out. Even now—he’s not happy.”
“Did he tell you so?”
Books 9-12: Finch's Fortune / The Master of Jalna / Whiteoak Harvest / Wakefield's Course Page 21
