Another Part of the Wood

by Denis Mackail

  But on this particular hot, fine morning, Noodles arrived at the rowing-boat to find that the Professor’s father was to all intents and purposes asleep. That is to say that though his gnarled hands were still, sculling gently so as to keep his vessel in its proper bearings, his eyes were closed and his pipe had fallen out of his mouth. No point in disturbing him, thought Noodles, and swam away on a course parallel with the English coast. This course was dictated by scrupulous obedience to St. Ethelburga’s regulations, which would have allowed you to swim right round your native land so long as you never landed and were never more than fifteen yards from shore.

  The regulations, however, had never really considered the possibility of anyone being able to swim like Noodles, and in a very few minutes she had gone right past the projecting rocks which marked the townward end of the educational cove. The sea wasn’t blue or green or any colour except that of blinding, sparkling light. Noodles turned on her back and screwed up her eyes, and sang, and continued to advance head first—kicking a good deal as she did so.

  “‘Why did you leave me?’” she sang. “‘Why did you go? Why did you teach me The things that——’ Oh; I say!”

  She still thought it was a jellyfish as she turned the other way up. But the mistake was obvious as she shook the water out of her eyes. It was a human face, and what was more it seemed to be startled out of its wits.

  “I say!” she called out. “I’m most awfully sorry I——”

  “Help!” said the face, and sank like a stone.

  “Hi!” shouted Noodles. “I say!”

  The face suddenly came up again, looking more startled than ever, and blew a fountain of water into the ocean.

  “Glub! Gop!” it said, wildly. And down it went again.

  “Don’t be a fool!” cried Noodles. “What on earth are you doing? Where are you?”

  Punctually as before, the face bobbed up—looking at least ten times more bewildered—and flapped its mouth in a weak, stupid sort of way, and began sinking for the third time.

  “No, you don’t!” said Noodles, rather sharply; and she made a grab at its hair. It instantly developed almost all the characteristics of an infuriated octopus, and Noodles found herself fighting for existence about two feet below the surface of the water. “Ridiculous,” she was saying to herself. “So pointless, I mean. Why can’t he keep his silly head?”

  The struggle continued with great violence.

  “All right,” said Noodles, under the water. “Drown yourself, then!”

  She delivered the most frightful jab with her knee, and found herself back in the light and air.

  “Bother!” she said to herself. “Now I’ve lost him.”

  Not a bit of it. In defiance of all custom and convention, the face actually came up for the fourth time, and though it was now the most indescribably disgusting colour, it spluttered almost as powerfully as ever.

  Noodles pushed it as hard as she could, hooked an elbow under its chin and struck out—as Professor Corcoran would have said—for the not so very distant shingle. “Idiot!” she kept gasping. “Stupid little man! I’ll teach you to go kicking like that.”

  Since the owner of the face was now being throttled as well as drowned, he no longer kicked either like that or in any other way. He just became heavier and heavier, until finally he grounded on a little sand-bank. Noodles then sat him up, thumped his back, pulled his hair, and yelled very loudly in his ear.

  As the result of this treatment he began opening his eyes.

  “Hullo,” he said, feebly. “What happened?”

  “Spit it out,” said Noodles. “Don’t mind me.”

  The stranger immediately availed himself of this suggestion—whether he had heard it or not—and Noodles looked the other way.

  “I was trying to float,” he said, presently. “Something seemed to hit me.”

  Noodles looked uncomfortable.

  “That was me,” she said. “I never saw you.”

  “Oh,” said the stranger. “I never saw you either.”

  But he saw her now, and suddenly the colour started coming back into his face.

  “I say,” he said; “who——”

  “If you can’t float better than that,” interrupted Noodles, firmly, “you’ve no business to go out of your depth. If those are your clothes over there, you’d better get dressed, I should think.”

  The stranger began staggering to his feet.

  “But you’ve saved my life,” he said. “I must know who you are.”

  “Why?” said Noodles.

  “So that I can thank you,” said the stranger.

  “But you just said it was my fault,” said Noodles.

  “No, no, my dear young——”

  “You did. You said I hit you.”

  “Oh, surely not. I was only——”

  “Well, I did,” said Noodles. “But that wasn’t what started it. If you’d had the least idea how to float——”

  Whee! went the whistle from the other side of the rocks.

  “Sorry,” said Noodles. “That’s for me.”

  “What?”

  “I must go. Are you all right, do you suppose?”

  “Yes, yes,” said the stranger. “And I can never——”

  “Good-bye, then. I say!”

  “Yes?”

  “You’ve got some seaweed on your nose. Yes, that’s better. Good-bye.”

  It would be quicker, probably, to scramble over the rocks than to return by sea. Yet how often is the longest way round the safest, if not literally the shortest, way home. Noodles took a flying leap from the last rock, and tried to turn back in mid-air.

  “Oh, Miss Maplethorpe!” she said, rising quickly to her feet. “I—I’m most awfully sorry.”

  Miss Maplethorpe, who was decently—in a sense—yet anything but completely attired, showed both surprise and annoyance at this invasion of her private dressing-room.

  “Ursula!” she said, at once coldly and heatedly. “Where have you been?”

  “Over there,” said Noodles, waving her arm.

  “And why?” asked Miss Maplethorpe, recovering a little more of her dignity.

  “Oh,” said Noodles. “Well, you see …”

  And she stopped. She wasn’t really sure whether she had saved the stranger’s life or not, but foresaw with curious accuracy how easily the adventure might be misunderstood. Supposing, for instance, they got hold of the little man, and he repeated his statement that she had hit him.

  And, besides, there was no doubt that he oughtn’t to have been a man at all.

  “Oh, well,” she said; “I—I wasn’t thinking, I suppose. And then I heard the whistle. And so …”

  Miss Maplethorpe shook her head.

  “You mean,” she said, “that you’ve been out of bounds.”

  “Well, yes. But——”

  “That will do,” said Miss Maplethorpe. “Miss Mulberry will have to deal with this. You’d better go and get dressed.”

  “Oh, but, Miss Maplethorpe——”

  “I can’t argue,” said Miss Maplethorpe. “Please do as I tell you.”

  “Oh,” said Noodles. “All right.”

  She turned round and continued her progress with a remarkable loss of elasticity.

  “Ursula!” cried Miss Maplethorpe.

  “Yes, Miss Maplethorpe?”

  “What on earth have you done to the back of your costume? It’s in ribbons!”

  “Oh, dash!”

  “Ursula!”

  “I mean——”

  But Miss Maplethorpe extended a fat, denunciatory arm as though exorcising the very spirit of evil.

  “Now,” she said, very inconsistently and unfairly, “I really shall tell Miss Mulberry. You make it impossible for me to do anything else.”

  So she told Miss Mulberry that Ursula Brett had been disobedient, impertinent, insolent and immodest, and Miss Mulberry said very well, then, no more bathing for Ursula Brett until further notice.

 
“You’ve hurt Miss Maplethorpe’s feelings very much,” she said. “Now, just tell me. What were you doing in the next cove?”

  “Nothing,” said Noodles, obstinately.

  “Is that the truth, Ursula?”

  “No,” said Noodles, insanely.

  So instead of being praised by all and given a certificate or even a medal for saving the stupid little man’s life, she was excommunicated from the Nature Rambles as well as the bathing, and she was commanded to write out a large number of irregular French verbs, and formed the subject of a long and treacherous letter to Mr. Cottenham.

  As, however, Mr. Cottenham never acknowledged this communication by even so much as a postcard, it cannot be said to have made the situation any blacker than it was already.

  4

  There was a hole in the hedge in the corner of the big playing-field behind the workshops, and as it overlooked the flinty road which runs up to St. Ethelburga’s and the younger of the two Newcliff golf-courses, it was a good hole through which to gaze at the world from which Noodles had now been completely cut off. If anyone saw her lying there, it seemed more than likely that they would forbid even this visual contact with freedom. But on this hot afternoon of the Thursday before Whitsun the risk of discovery was very slight indeed. The junior school were playing games at the other end of the big field. The senior school—minus Noodles—were out on a Nature Ramble in the charge of Miss Kent and Miss Quilter; in other words, they were straggling over the downs and trying hard to talk about anything except birds and plants; and the remainder of the staff were hiding from the stifling heat in the school-building itself. No gardener or groundsman would, as Noodles well knew, come poking about here on a Thursday afternoon, because it was early closing day in Newcliff, when they all vanished at one o’clock sharp. So she lay there with her head in the hole, and stared thoughtfully out at the flinty road, and the distant villas, and the still more distant town, and at the bright-blue sea which filled the furthest distance of all. And insects buzzed, and vehicles came dashing past on their way to or from the golf-course, and the white dust swirled and settled again, and a warm breeze hummed gently in the telephone-wires, and the sun blazed away from an absolutely cloudless sky.

  “If it wasn’t,” said Noodles to herself, “that it was meant to be a punishment, I must say that I’d far sooner be here than doing one of those awful rambles. But of course they’ll all come back looking as if I’d missed something, and that’s the part that one hates.”

  She selected a long grass-stalk, and put one end in her mouth.

  “The people,” she said to herself, “who say that it all goes faster when you start getting older haven’t the faintest idea what they’re talking about. I feel as if this term had lasted for hundreds of years already, and yet I’ve hardly been back more than a month. I wonder—— Hullo! I wonder if that man’s going to be killed.”

  It was a natural assumption that there was a man in the middle of the appalling noise which was shooting up the flinty road at nearly fifty miles an hour, and it was reasonable to speculate on the destiny of anyone who rode a motor-bicycle with such absolute disregard for everything except speed. “Horrible,” said Noodles to herself. “But frightful fun, I expect. That is, unless you go and—— Oh, my hat!”

  For no apparent reason, except possibly to demonstrate what a motor-bicycle will stand, the rider had jammed on his brakes, had swerved, had looked over his shoulder, had swerved again, had still further checked his impetus by ploughing up a quantity of the flinty road with his shoes, had swung right round in a swoop that took him clean off the flinty road altogether, and—as the explosions beneath him suddenly died away—could be seen facing the direction in which he had first appeared with an air of calm and pointless triumph. Not that his features were yet visible, for though hatless he was most adequately goggled, but his whole outline seemed to be rejoicing in the memory of that wild and deafening dash and that equally wild and deafening countercheck. “Yes,” he appeared to be reflecting; “that’s where I was and this is where I am, and my machine’s still holding together, and I’m still alive. Splendid!”

  He then stepped off the machine, jerked at something so that it stood up without his assistance, untied a small leatherette case from the bracket behind the saddle, crossed the road towards Noodles—who recoiled quickly behind the hedge—and sat down just outside it with his back to her.

  “What’s he going to do now?” said Noodles to herself. “I wonder if he’s going to have a picnic.”

  She crept forward again cautiously, and was again struck by the extreme brilliance of the motor-bicyclist’s blazer, and by the extreme, and in the circumstances almost incredible, sleekness of his hair. He had removed his goggles now, and was taking something out of the small leatherette case.

  “Oh!” said Noodles to herself. “Oh, I say!”

  For the article which the motor-bicyclist had just carefully removed and was now delicately fondling was the very dead spit and image of her own beloved stringed instrument which had been reft from her by Miss Maplethorpe on the very first day of the summer term. A pang shot through her so that it was all that she could do not to cry out aloud. But she controlled herself with great difficulty, and the motor-bicyclist—who had now propped a sheet of music against the knees of his flannel trousers—began a painstaking and laborious twang.

  Presently he burst into equally painstaking and laborious song.

  “‘Why,’” he demanded, very slowly and uncertainly, “‘does my baby smile at me? Why——’ No, dash it, that’s wrong. ‘Why— (twang, twang)—does my baby——’ No, that isn’t it, either. Start again. ‘Why—(twang, twang)——’ No. I mean, ‘Why …’”

  It was more than Noodles could stand. Imagine Orpheus lurking behind a hedge while a stranger tried to teach himself the lute or lyre only a yard and a half away. Imagine any skilled performer faced with circumstances like these, and precluded by nothing but a head-mistress’s embargo from coming to the beginner’s assistance. Imagine, also, how far that embargo would prevail if the skilled performer had been deprived of his or her favourite instrument for more than four weeks. Noodles’s conscience gave but one faint squeak, and instantly threw up the sponge.

  “I say,” she said, putting her head out of the hole. “I say!”

  The instrumentalist very naturally jumped as if he had been stung.

  “Oh!” he said, as his sleek head spun round. And then: “Oh!”

  “Oh!” said Noodles.

  For she had recognised him as swiftly as he had recognised her. It was the little man whom she had last seen in the English Channel. The little man whom she had dragged from a watery grave, and who had—though unwittingly—gone and got her into all her subsequent trouble.

  “Oh!” they both said, again. And then the little man began scrambling to his feet.

  “The girl!” he said. “I’ve been looking out for you all over the shop. Why did you run away like that? I say, do you live here? I say, this is all right. I say, this is the goods. I say——”

  “Are you all right again?” asked Noodles.

  “Oh, rather. It was nothing, really. But you absolutely saved my life.”

  “I know,” said Noodles. “And——”

  She had been about to add: “And a lot of good it did me afterwards.” Only perhaps this would sound rather rude, and it was nice of him to remember her, and not to remind her how rough she had been.

  “And what?” said the little man.

  “Nothing,” said Noodles, smiling at him out of the hole in the hedge. “But he’s rather awful, really,” she said to herself; and a cold shudder passes over us as she reaches this very accurate opinion. For though no one seems to be quicker than Noodles at identifying rather awful men when they cross her path, experience suggests that no one is less capable of dealing with them once they have done so. That smile, moreover, gives no hint of anything but amusement and appreciation, and is, of course, devastating in its charm.
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br />   “I say,” said the little man; “you’re not laughing at me, are you?”

  “Oh, no,” said Noodles. “I was only just—I mean, I wasn’t doing anything.”

  The little man seemed satisfied.

  “And you’ve been here all the time?” he asked. “Why didn’t you let me know?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you saw the Newcliff Argus, didn’t you? They had my picture in it.”

  “What?” said Noodles. “Why?”

  “They printed the whole story. I’ve never had such an ad.”

  “Such a what? What story?”

  “Oh, come!” said the little man. “You spotted me, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, of course I did. After you’d taken those goggles off, I mean.”

  “Oh, not now,” said the little man, almost impatiently. “I mean, you knew who I was when you rescued me. Didn’t you?”

  “Well, no,” said Noodles. “Not exactly.”

  “Well, when you saw the Argus, then?”

  “But I’ve never seen the Argus”.

  “But didn’t your friends show it you? Do you mean to say …”

  An extraordinary possibility seemed suddenly to present itself to the figure in the blazer. “Do you mean,” he asked, incredulously, “that you still don’t know who I am?”

  “I’m most awfully sorry,” said Noodles, politely, “but——”

  “I’m Lester Vaughan.”

  “Oh,” said Noodles.

  “You’re surprised?”

  What was the polite answer to that? Noodles had a sudden inspiration.

  “My name’s Ursula Brett,” she said.

  Mr. Vaughan nodded vaguely.