Knight Without Armour (37 page)

“Have you ever slept out?”

“Oh, often.”

“You seem to have done all kinds of things.”

“
Many
kinds of things, perhaps.”

“I wish you’d tell some of your adventures.”

“I might, some time.”

Yet he continually put it off. Partly, of course, because it was always
easier to do so; Mrs. Consett’s chatter was a strong current that could
be swum against, but it was far less trouble to relax and let it carry one
along. And partly, too, because he felt a curious reluctance to break the
tranquillity of those simple days, and what tranquillity or simplicity could
remain after he had told his entire story?

He had, in fact, few chances of talking to the girl alone, and he could
not, he felt, tell her the final secret—her own identity—at any
other time.

One night, after dinner, someone brought a gramophone into the tiled hall
and put on dance records. The girl asked him if he danced and he replied,
smiling: “I’m afraid I don’t—I never learned, and
I’m too old now.” She said: “I’ll teach you,
then,” and as other couples were by that time moving from their seats,
he replied, with sudden decision: “Will you? All right.” He found
it easy; she was a good pilot, and he himself had a sure sense of rhythm.
“As if you were too old to learn,” she whispered, reproachfully,
as they drifted in amidst the lamp-lit shadows. “I don’t think
you’re really too old for anything.”

“Although I’m nearly three times your own age?”

“That doesn’t matter. You don’t
feel
old, do you?
And if anyone saw you when you were making a fire for a picnic, they’d
think you were only a boy.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I was watching you this afternoon. You were enjoying it,
weren’t you?”

“Absolutely, I admit.”

“So was I. I don’t think I’ve ever got to know anybody
so quickly as I have you. It seems rather an awful thing to say, but
sometimes—sometimes I wish mother wasn’t quite so—so
everywhere
—and
always
; she’s a dear, but she does
chatter terribly, doesn’t she?”

“Just as well, perhaps, because I’m not much of a talker
myself.”

“Neither am I, yet I’d rather like to give ourselves a chance.
By the way, were you once a rubber planter out in the Malay
States?”

“Sumatra, it was. But how did you know?”

“Oh, mother seems to have been finding out all about you. She
happened to see an article in the London
Times
, and thought it must be
you, from the name and initials. Then someone else told her—some people
staying here, but I think they’ve gone now—that you’d been
a planter out there and had made heaps of money.”

“It depends how much you mean by heaps.”

She laughed. “Personally, I’m not very curious, but mother
seems to think you’re a millionaire travelling incognito, or something
of that sort.”

He laughed also. “You can contradict the rumour,” he assured
leer.

They went on dancing. They danced, in fact, with hardly a pause until
nearly midnight, and when they finally rejoined Mrs. Consett he said, with
eyes and cheeks glowing: “Your daughter is a most charming teacher. I
hope we haven’t been allowing the lesson to last too long?”

“Oh, not at all—not at all.” Indeed, she seemed quite
pleased.

He was tired that night when he went to bed, but it was the sort of
tiredness to be expected after a day on the mountains and an evening of fox-
trots. Curiously, in a way, he felt much better since he had begun the more
strenuous life of Roone’s; it seemed to tire him far less to scramble
up a mountain in search of fuel for a picnic-fire than to take leisurely
strolls along city pavements.

The girl and he had more time together during the second week; there were
occasions when Mrs. Consett professed fatigue and said she would write
letters in the lounge while they, if they cared, took a walk. Roone’s
was growing emptier; the eight months’ season of slack business was
approaching and the first gales of autumn had already laid bare the trees in
the woods. As an offset to the general exodus of visitors, a light cruiser
came to anchor in Carrigole Bay for a few days’ visit. Most of the
officers and men carne ashore to Roone’s; bluejackets swarmed into the
public bar, while the hall and the long verandah terraces were filled with
shouting and laughing naval officers. Every night they kept up their
merriment to a late hour, and most of the day a group of them hung about the
counter in the hall, chatting and joking with the Roones.

One morning Fothergill and the girl made the ascent of the Baragh, a
steep, cone-shaped peak that rose a thousand feet at the back of the hotel.
An hour of scrambling through heather brought them to the summit, whence
could be seen the roofs of Carrigole and the long bay stretching westward
into the sunlit sea.

NOW, he felt, as he sat on a rough stone with the sweep of sea and
mountain all around him and the girl seated on another stone somewhat
below,—
now
was just his chance. He could talk without
interruption; he could begin at the beginning and tell all that was to be
told.

Yet he didn’t even begin to tell. Another thought carne to
him—that in all the world she was probably the only person he would
ever meet who had ever known Daly—the sole surviving contact with all
in his own life that had mattered most. And that dark passion of his, subdued
for years, spilled over now in a little tender flood of affection for the
girl.

Suddenly she said: “Do you remember I told you I sometimes had
dreams that might have something to do with the time before I left
Russia?”

He nodded.

“I had a dream of that sort last night. Too queer to be remembered,
really, but the queerest part was that you were mixed up in it
somehow.”

“
I
was?”

“Yes. We seemed to be going somewhere all the time—just one
place after another—and at night we slept out in the open and used hot
stones for water-bottles.” She laughed. “Isn’t it curious
the way everything gets mixed up in dreams?”

The chance to tell her was again full on him, yet once again he forbore.
He was still wrestling with memories of those old and epic days. He said,
abruptly: “Are you happy in America? What do you do there? Tell me the
kind of life you have.”

She looked amused. “I rather thought mother had told you everything
you ever wanted to hear about our home life. As a matter of fact, we really
do
have a good time and get on splendidly together. We play a little
bridge and tennis (though we’re both very bad), and we just have money
enough to travel now and again and go to theatres and have friends to stay
with us. I shall have to earn my own living, of course, for which I’m
rather glad—I think it’s a mistake to do nothing but idle about
and wait to be married by somebody.”

“Don’t you wish you’d been born rich, or high up in the
world—a princess, say?”

“I wouldn’t mind if I’d been born rich, though I
don’t suppose it would have made me any happier. And as for being a
princess, when I feel romantic I sometimes try to kid myself that I
am
one—after all, nobody knows who I really am, do they?”

“I suppose not.”

“Though I daresay I wouldn’t really like it if I were. It must
be very tiresome having to be important all the time. It would stop me from
doing things like this, wouldn’t it?”

“Like this?”

“Yes. Scrambling up a mountain with you.”

He laughed—a sudden almost boyish laugh that startled the mountain
silences. “Yes, you’re right. You’re happier as you are, no
doubt.”

“I
know
I am. Oh, it
has
been such fun, travelling all
over Europe ever since nearly a year ago, and the strange thing is, it all
somehow seems to have been leading up to this. I mean
this—here—now—just
this
.” She looked at him
quickly and then stared far across the distance to the furthest horizon.
“I like these mountains ever so much better than the Swiss ones,
don’t you? I suppose it’s heresy to say so, but the Alps rather
remind me of wedding-cake.”

And all the time and all the way down as they descended he was thinking of
something else—of gilded salons and baroque antechambers, of consulates
and embassies and chancelleries, of faded uniforms and tarnished orders, of
intrigues and plottings and counter-plottings, of Paris cafés where Russian
émigrés
passed their days on a treadmill of futile anticipation, of
Riviera hotels where the very waiters were princes and expected extra tips
for so being, of dark and secret assassinations, of frontiers stiff with
bayonets, of men in Moscow council-rooms ruthless, logical, and aware. That
madly spinning world lay so close, and it was in his power to thrust her into
the very vortex of it.

That night he took out of a sealed envelope certain curiously-marked
papers. They were twelve years old; time and a fumigating oven had
considerably faded them. He looked them through and then replaced them in the
envelope. It was late, past midnight; the sailors had returned to their ship;
even the Roones had gone to bed, and the lamps in the corridor were all out.
He groped his way downstairs and found the drawing-room. There were the
remains of a fire just faintly red in the grate; he knelt on the hearth-rug
and fanned the embers till they glowed into flame. Then he placed the
envelope on the top and watched it burn with all its contents. He waited till
the last inch was turned to ashes and he could break and scatter them with
the poker. Then he went back to his room and to bed.

But he did not sleep too well. If one problem had been settled, another
remained; if he had not traced her in order to tell her who she was, why had
he traced her at all? What need was there to stay at Roone’s any
longer? And so, bewitching and insidious, came again the memory of the past;
she was a shadow, an echo, reminding him that he was still young, and that
the Harley Street man might have made a mistake. And the idea came to him
that he might tell her some day, not about her own identity, which did not
matter, but about himself and Daly.

The next morning began a chaotic interlude of travel; he wired to his
London lawyer and the two arranged a half-way meeting at the railway hotel at
Fishguard. The dignified elderly solicitor, obviously flustered by such
hectic arrangements, scratched away for an hour in a private sitting-room;
then Fothergill signed; and two hotel servants acted as witnesses and were
suitably rewarded. The lawyer saw his client off on the Rosslare boat and
parted from him full of misgivings. “It is not for me to offer
criticism, Mr. Fothergill,” he said, accepting a drink in the saloon
before the gangways were lowered, “but I do hope you have given all
this your most careful consideration.” Fothergill assured him that he
had, and added: “Anyhow, I hope I’m not going to die just
yet—it’s only a precaution.” To which the lawyer replied:
“I must say I think you’re looking very much better than when I
saw you in London,” and Fothergill answered: “My dear chap, I
really don’t think I ever felt better in my life. It’s the Irish
climate—it seems to suit me.”

He was at Roone’s again by the afternoon of the next day, with Mrs.
Consett immensely curious about his lightning dash to England.
“Business,” he told her, and she was satisfactorily impressed;
her idea of the successful business man was perfectly in accord with such
fantastic journeys on mysterious errands.

Back at Roone’s he yielded again to the spell of magic possibility.
Could he tell her about their earlier meeting when she was but a child; could
he thus make fast to his own life this new and charming fragrance that might
otherwise fade away?

So he perplexed himself, but that Saturday night as he saw her talking to
a young naval sub-lieutenant he came to sudden decision. He saw her smiling
at the pink-checked and handsome boy; he heard their laughter together; then
they danced, and all at once, as he watched them, he felt old again and knew
that he was old; and when Mrs. Consett began her usual chatter, he felt: We
are a couple of old folks, watching the youngsters amuse themselves…

But half an hour later she came up to him, having left her partner, and
said: “Don’t you want to dance tonight, Mr. Fothergill? I suppose
you’re tired after the journey?” And he was up in a moment, ready
to whirl through the world with her, old or young.

She said, as they danced: “That was a nice boy, if he wasn’t
so silly.”

“I thought he looked a very attractive young fellow.”

“Yes—but silly. I suppose most girls like it and I’m the
exception. I never could get on very well with boys of that age.”

“
That
age, indeed? I wouldn’t be surprised if
he’s half a dozen years older than you.”

“Yes, I know—it’s strange, isn’t it? Perhaps the
silliness is in me, after all.”

“In you?”

“Why not? Probably I’m old for my years. I’ve a sort of
theory that I aged a good deal before I was six and that now I’m
anything between thirty and forty.”

“That would put you nearer me.”

“Yes, wouldn’t it?”

Her calm, friendly eyes were looking up at him, and he had to exert every
atom of will-power to prevent himself from yielding to the call of so rich a
memory. His brain reeled and eddied; he began to speak, but found his voice
so grotesque and uncertain that he broke off and tried to fix himself into
some kind of temporary coherence; he heard her saying: “I don’t
think you’re dancing very well to-night—you look as if your
mind’s on something else all the time.”

“As a matter of fact, it just is.”

“Shall we stop, then?
I
don’t mind. Perhaps you feel
tired?”

“I never felt less tired in my life. What I’d just like now is
to go out and climb the Baragh.”

“Really? Do you mean it—really?”