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_Title:_ Under the Skin
_Date of first publication:_ 1950
_Author:_ Phyllis Bottome (1882-1963)
_Date first posted:_ May 14, 2026
_Date last updated:_ May 14, 2026
Faded Page eBook #20260522

This eBook was produced by: Mardi Desjardins, John Routh & the online
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                          [Cover Illustration]

                       _ALSO BY PHYLLIS BOTTOME_

                       _Wind in His Fists_
                       _Old Wine_
                       _Private Worlds_
                       _Level Crossing_
                       _The Mortal Storm_
                       _Formidable to Tyrants_
                       _Heart of a Child_
                       _London Pride_
                       _Masks and Faces_
                       _Within the Cup_
                       _The Life Line_
                       _Survival_
                       _Search for a Soul_




                                 UNDER
                                THE SKIN


                               A Novel by
                            PHYLLIS BOTTOME



                                NEW YORK
                      HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY




                          COPYRIGHT, 1950, BY
                            PHYLLIS BOTTOME

                            _first edition_

                PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

                             Under the Skin




                              _CHAPTER I_


Lucy Armstrong went on deck at dawn. The Chief Officer saw her, and let
her see him; this was a great mark of approval on his part, for he
usually remained wholly invisible to passengers except at meals. He
disliked them almost as much as he disliked bananas, which were the
chief freight his ship carried.

Lucy said in her polite, unobtrusive voice, “I was wondering when we
should see land.”

“It’s there now,” said Mr. Musgrave with a stiff gesture which put land
into the exact spot on the ocean where he knew it should have been, “but
you can’t see it yet, not for another half hour.”

“I was wondering,” Lucy ventured, “I was wondering if you could show me
where I could see it best—alone.” Mr. Musgrave’s eyes rested for an
observant, but non-conducting moment upon Lucy’s shell-pink face. The
Chief Officer was deeply in love with his own wife, yet he knew that he
would always remember Lucy’s face. Lucy’s was neither a glamorous nor a
spectacular face, but once it had aroused attention, it was difficult to
forget. She had the rounded brows and innocent, wondering eyes of
Botticelli’s Venus rising from the seas; but Lucy had none of the
slightly tubercular look—wan and drooping—of Botticelli’s ladies. She
was instead very erect, slender and well-balanced. She took, the Chief
Officer noticed, though there was a distinct swell on the sea, no
particular care of herself—she had no need to take care; automatically,
her trained and capable body took care of itself.

“Games—open air—discipline,” the Chief Officer thought, “but not
pigheaded.”

Lucy didn’t mind asking for things, and from the Chief Officer she got
what she had asked. He found her exactly the place she wanted behind a
lifeboat ready for lowering, where she could stand in a railed corner
without anyone knowing she was there. Then, but not before, Lucy gave
him a smile that gratified the Chief Officer to the core of his heart.

As for Lucy, she thought about Mr. Musgrave exactly as much and for as
long as she thought about the railing on which, for a moment, as the
ship lifted to a higher swell, she found it convenient to rest her hand.
At last she was alone with the dawn, face to face with the new life she
had chosen; although she was not yet quite sure why she had chosen it.

Lucy had lived for five years on duty and danger, as intemperate people
live on cocktails. Not even her marriage to Michael at nineteen had
altered these perpetual stimulants. They were a perfect match. Both were
well born and well bred, yet an innate austerity prevented either of
them from using these privileges in a self-indulgent manner. Just what
Michael thought about cricket, food, the Royal Family, and how to treat
those beneath you, Lucy herself thought.

Out of the three months of their spiritually uncheckered and violently
changeable married life, they had had less than three weeks of
consecutive living. Each of their meetings was as thrilling as the
first, each of their partings as severe a cleavage as the last, except
that the last was final.

Lucy always said while Michael was alive that she was sure he would come
back safely from every flight. She simply hadn’t a doubt in her heart.
Fear would have been a kind of disloyalty to him. So that when he didn’t
come back it was an affront to both her heart and head. Still, Lucy
continued to do her duty exactly as Michael would have expected her to
do it. There is an expression, usually attributed to fear, but equally
natural to grief, about people “freezing in their tracks.” This is what
happened to Lucy.

During the following two years Lucy’s idea was that she was living in
another world with Michael. She could not believe that Michael was dead;
it was much simpler to behave as if she were not alive.

She was getting over an enormous, uncalled for shock, and this was the
only way in which she could manage it. Young men, who were constantly
thrown with her, in her daily tasks, tried to shake her out of this
frozen state. They proposed marriage or its equivalent and were refused
by Lucy, in a routine manner. Many of them got killed soon afterward and
then Lucy felt faintly sorry, because if she had known for certain that
they were going to be killed she might have accepted them.

It was two years after Michael’s death before Lucy met Jerry.

One afternoon, when Lucy was at home on leave in the little flat which,
after her parents were killed, she shared with her brother and sister,
her brother rang her up and said he couldn’t make his leave, and she
must take his skipper, a perfectly good type, out on a beano. Jerry
didn’t know a girl in London and was not the kind that likes picking up
tarts. Lucy had better take him to a dinner dance or a theater, or both,
if possible. Jim and Jerry were on an M.T.B. together in the Dover
Patrol so such a request was not an obligation that could be evaded.
Lucy had to consent, and she had hardly finished brushing her hair into
a glossy mist, when the door bell buzzed, and Jerry came in.

He was all that Michael wasn’t, aggressively masculine, without neatness
or suppression. He made no attempt to control his voice or his large
clumsy movements. Lucy couldn’t think who his people were, though she
very soon found out that they were nobodies. Jerry had only been to a
grammar school, yet he didn’t seem to think it mattered, and was full of
jokes. He had red hair and no manners, and Lucy felt she might have been
his mother, and was glad she wasn’t. She was not quite twenty-two, and
Jerry was only nineteen.

He fell violently in love with Lucy and told her so before they had been
half an hour together. He would not take no for an answer and Lucy had
to box his ears before they went out to dinner. Still they did go out to
dinner, and after it Jerry suggested returning to the flat in order to
spend the night with her.

“You might just as well ask a stone to spend the night with you,” Lucy
told him furiously. “I don’t feel anything at all for you, and I don’t
_want_ to feel anything. Even if you were all the things I like, instead
of all the things I dislike, I wouldn’t take the risk of getting to
care—like that—for anyone again!”

“Risk!” Jerry had exclaimed. “What a hideous little funk you are! Why,
you’ve only had your heart broken _once_, haven’t you? How many times do
you suppose I risk my perfectly good young life—heart and all? Every
few minutes, my girl. With luck I may hang on a few weeks more. And
you’re so stingy that you don’t care to give me the only thing I want
before I hop off into Eternity—or isn’t it? I do call you a rotten
little cad—though one wouldn’t think it to look at you!”

That was how it began. Jerry went on rapping straight at Lucy’s heart,
he wouldn’t let her muffle up her injury or keep it still. Like a modern
surgeon, he made her heart move rather than rest. He showed her neither
sympathy nor admiration, but when he gazed into her eyes, his own bright
with laughter, Lucy saw—at the bottom of Jerry’s laughter his noisy,
passionate, kindly, unfettered spirit—and knew that she had found at
least a friend.

“I can’t—I won’t! I won’t—I can’t!” Lucy kept on saying for days and
weeks; but to go on refusing Jerry was like shutting a good dog out in
the snow. Lucy’s R.A.F. camp was near Dover, and she began to listen
constantly to what was happening to the M.T.B.’s on the Dover Patrol.

One evening, in the rain, under an empty lamppost, they suddenly agreed
to get married, but it never happened. A torpedo struck Jerry’s little
ship and flames and smoke were the last Lucy heard of Jerry. Victory and
Peace came soon afterward, and Lucy was summoned to Buckingham Palace to
be decorated.

She went alone, except for her two ghosts, one on each side of her.
Michael’s ghost was reverent and deeply satisfied; Jerry’s ghost was
merry and derisive with a heart full of good fellowship, touched with
embarrassment. Lucy hardly felt as if she had a self to be decorated,
but ghosts or no ghosts, she behaved as she had been trained to behave
and did not disgrace herself. This was the peak of Lucy’s career in the
country which had given her so much and required so much of her. It was
as if Buckingham Palace had killed even her ghosts.

The Caribbean Sea grew slowly more and more visible. Darkness slipped
away from it, so that Lucy soon became aware of the golden carpet of
seaweed beneath the ship’s keel, a stiff and intricate design, broken
sometimes into patches through which a transparency of blue satin sea
spread downward, into an unseen world.

Above her the darkness separated itself from an immense canopy of
colorless light, where clouds thicker and brighter than any clouds Lucy
had ever seen banked themselves out of the sky into a city of
immeasurable palaces.

These cloud castles did not scrape the sky, they seemed to lean out of
it, as if space balanced them on invisible wings.

An opening of apricot light appeared behind them, breaking into a flood
of golden foam over the colorless air. She could hear noises behind her
of the awakening ship—rough voices and sudden orders; water ran over
the decks and figures passed behind the boat on mysterious errands,
carrying ropes and buckets. Soon Robert Anstruther would start looking
for her.

What a pity, Lucy thought, that more men were not like the Chief
Officer, married to satisfying wives with whom they were constantly in
love, and yet capable of being useful to unattended women passengers who
wished to remain unattended!

Not that Lucy did not like Robert Anstruther. She had played deck tennis
with him, and danced with him. She had been his partner at bridge, and
thought what a good thing it was that bridge requires four people to
play it.

Lucy had been sweet to Robert Anstruther because, as the Chief Officer
had noticed, she was not pigheaded and liked being sweet. Still decks on
freighters, Lucy thought, are too small. Anyone can sit on the chair
next to you, and talk and talk, and get to know you better and better
whether you like it or not.

There had been a sort of understanding that Lucy and Robert were to
spend the last few hours of the voyage on deck together and it was this
sort of understanding that Lucy most wished to avoid.

She hadn’t come to the West Indies to be proposed to by Bob Anstruther,
or else she might just as well have stayed at home and been proposed to
by other men exactly like him.

Whatever she had accepted this strange new job for, it wasn’t marriage.

Her mind slipped back to the time before she had any lovers, when she
was a happy unconscious little girl protected by satisfactory parents.

Once every year, just before Christmas, an invisible but highly prized
uncle from the island the ship was now approaching had sent Lucy’s
family a mysterious and splendid packing case, containing strangely
succulent oranges, grapefruit, ginger and guava jelly, and indefinite
quantities of celestial barley sugar. It was a Christmas box which
seemed to spring into a bleak winter, out of high feathery blue waves
and scarlet blossoms.

What her mother had told her about the Island, and what actually she had
felt between her teeth, it was now difficult to differentiate, but the
feeling was there still. This strange, nostalgic memory was really why
Lucy had accepted her new job.

Lucy was glad no one was near her who would tell her anything about the
Island, because looking across the golden sea she could invent whatever
life she liked out of the deep purple shadows, which she now knew were
land.

The ship moved swiftly on through the scented light, till Lucy saw quite
clearly a queer zigzag of land like a broken picture puzzle, lying flat
upon the turquoise sea.

The built-up, unsubstantiated life of twenty-eight years, with all its
staggering griefs, fell away from Lucy. She wasn’t Lucy any more; she
was a part of a wild, strange universe of light and air. There were no
walls to prevent the intense intrusion of golden light or check the
scent of unseen flowers.

Lucy did not remember that the Island, once wrenched from Spaniards, and
cajoled from buccaneers, belonged to the British Empire. She did not
remind herself of her new duties stretching before her on a track which
she must meticulously follow. She simply stood hidden behind the
lifeboat, with the sun blazing down upon her, and the high, spineless
foam breaking against the edge of the land, without a definite thought
in her mind, but with all her heart roused to know itself alive. She was
alone and free.

Something, after all, belonged to her separately from other human
beings, something quite different from lovers and honors and duties,
something which was flowing through her without her having made any
effort of her own. The air lifted her carefully brushed hair and tossed
it carelessly to and fro. Lucy did not even push it back into place. She
forgot it had a place.

She was part of the air that pushed against her. She was part of the
waves that she saw, feathery and white, rise high out of the smooth
turquoise floor and lose themselves in the golden air.

A cold-eyed bird flew close to her with a searching glance. It was as if
the bird said, “You and I are both alive and that is all that counts.”

“I think you had better come out of there now.” The Chief Officer’s
voice sounded over her shoulder. “That guy Anstruther will have it
you’ve fallen overboard, and the passport officers are in the dining
saloon.”




                              _CHAPTER II_


Robert Anstruther looked down at Lucy in a most formidable manner. He
was six feet two, and had gray eyes which glittered when he was angry.
His smooth black hair fitted his well-shaped head like a cap. His
features were impressively good, except his mouth, which was a little
loose and careless, as if he had not made up his mind what to do about
life and thought it didn’t matter.

Lucy had made him very angry, for Bob felt that he ought to have what he
wanted and he was always outraged when he did not get it.

A crowd surged around them, some of whom Lucy was afraid would hear what
Robert was going to say.

“Where the hell have you been?” Robert demanded savagely. “I’ve had
twins about you—thought you’d jumped overboard. I’ve been round and
round this bloody deck till my head swims—I sent a steward to your
cabin half a dozen times and even had the Captain out on the mat. Now
the place is mucked up with passport people and baggage, let alone the
whole ship’s crowd! It’s quite useless trying to talk to you.” Lucy
hoped that it _was_ useless. She lifted eyes that carried an expression
associated with innocence to Bob’s angry glare.

“I’ve been on deck all the time,” she murmured, so low that he had to
bend his head at least a foot in order to hear her.

“Even her hair smells sweet,” he thought in the midst of his anger.
Lucy’s eyes were deep blue, like a rain-washed hyacinth; they shone up
at him between a fringe of dark lashes with disarming gentleness.

“Behind a boat,” Lucy explained. “It seemed such a good place. I hoped
you’d understand. I somehow just wanted to see the Island alone for the
first time. I thought you might turn up, or not—but I didn’t want
anyone else to—to break in.”

Robert’s anger evaporated. He reminded himself of Lucy’s dead husband
and worse still of the fellow who had been lost in the drink a few days
before their marriage. No doubt these ghosts had haunted Lucy. She’d
have to learn to swallow them as Bob himself meant to swallow them, for
this was the girl he intended to marry, ghosts or no ghosts.

“Anyhow, where’s your luggage?” he asked abruptly, “I’ll see you through
the customs. My parents will be along somewhere—I’d like you to meet
them. Got your landing card ready, and your passport?”

Lucy nodded. She always had the right papers ready, and needed none of
the help which she so often received. She wanted Bob to keep away from
Everslade until she had had time to learn a little more about her new
world, but she was definitely glad that he lived on the same island. He
belonged to her old world. He had spent the last few years juggling with
death in the Bomber Command.

Those who had belonged to this juggler’s world seldom spoke of it to
each other, but when they were together they imperceptibly relaxed the
inner strain of hiding what they knew. With civilians they were forced
to live anonymously, since those who had not broken through the thin
crust of the civilized world into chaos knew nothing about the sickness
of fear or the bottomless relief of escape. If you tried to tell them of
your war experiences they would think you a coward or a hero. They did
not know that fear could be as natural as your morning tea, only very
much colder. They had no idea that in danger what you did was automatic,
and nothing to make a fuss about, unless you didn’t do it.

Lucy knew what Bob felt for her and she was fully conscious of the
strong tie between them; she would be sorry if she had to give up Bob
and the easy fun they might have had together, in order to escape from
his love; but she was quite certain that she would escape from it.

The sun poured down upon the docks. The golden city of dreams had
suddenly become a noisy slum.

Slender little dark boys venturesomely dived for pennies into
translucent water between the ship’s side and the dock. There wasn’t
much room for them, but they came up somehow, while anxious passengers,
incredulous of their agility, shouted to them not to try. Natives in
long narrow caïques hung around the ship like flies, holding up pitiful
rubbish which even they could hardly have expected anyone to buy.

Finally the little boats with their dubious contents were waved off by
the crew, and the gangplank fixed. The passengers moved slowly down onto
the dazzling strip of dock, to be seized upon by welcoming friends or
acrobatic black porters.

Bob caught the shoulder of a man whom he instinctively knew would be the
best porter, and soon had Lucy standing in a vast shed exactly in front
of the letter “A” before an accommodating black official, who seemed
sure in advance that Lucy would have nothing to declare.

A small brilliant butterfly of a woman, who might have been any age,
precipitated herself upon Bob.

“Bob!” she cried. “My Bob! How big! How absurd! How _lovely_ to have you
home again!”

Bob held her in his hands as carefully as if she were a butterfly and
embraced her tenderly.

“My mother,” he said to Lucy with laughing pride, “isn’t she small and
sweet? Where’s Dad?”

“Oh, no doubt he’s being useful in his own proper way!” his mother
replied a little scornfully. “I believe there’s a barrier or something
that he’s the other side of, but I just ducked under a policeman’s arm.
Do we take this nice girl, whom you haven’t introduced me to, home with
us—there’s plenty of room in the car?”

“Her name’s Lucy,” Bob explained, “Lucy Armstrong, the new headmistress
of Everslade, but we can’t take her with us this time—she’s got to be
handed over to the King’s House people, who said they’d have her met,
and then we’ll trot along.”

“No!” his mother cried with a little squeak of incredulity and delight.
“No, she can’t be! It’s impossible! But how heavenly—what a scream! How
cross they’ll all be! She’s so young! Never you mind, Lucy, if the old
cats on the committee tear you limb from limb you come to me, and I’ll
fight the lot of them for you. Here’s Mabel Gosse coming along now,
looking as if she expected outriders to clear the way for her. That’s
because Sybil Moreton sent her to meet you—Tommy’s got the measles.”

Mabel Gosse was obviously searching for someone whom it was important
she should meet, but her eyes ran over Lucy with complete unconcern.

She stopped to shake hands warmly with Bob and to congratulate his
mother upon his homecoming.

“I don’t suppose,” she said, “that headmistresses of girls’ schools are
much in your line, Bob, but since you have crossed with her, you must at
least know her by sight, and I’ve _got_ to find Mrs. Armstrong. Sybil
Moreton has sent me to take her over—Tommy’s got the measles—and I
don’t see anyone on the dock who looks as if she could be her.”

“Well, don’t go on looking for her,” Bob said genially, “here she is,
and she happens to be exactly my line. _This_ is Lucy Armstrong, and
she’ll think ‘Tommy’s got the measles’ is a code, because of course she
hasn’t the least idea who anyone at King’s House is. Over to you,
Mabel.” And he pushed Lucy slightly by the arm toward Mrs. Gosse, who
drew back as suddenly as if she had been stung by a nettle.

“It’s not a joke?” she asked uncertainly, and then, recovering her
poise, shook hands warmly with Lucy.

“Lady Moreton,” she told her, “is terribly sorry—you’ve heard from her,
haven’t you, before leaving England? She particularly wanted you to stay
at King’s House for the night before going on into the mountains to your
school, but most unfortunately her little boy has just developed
measles, and Dr. Lemon says she mustn’t put you up, or even see you, so
as I am a member of your committee, she has asked me to act for her—and
I _do_ hope you’ll come. . . .”

Mabel Gosse suddenly stopped speaking. It was more than a pause in
speech, it was a pause in the flow of something friendly and warm, which
had encircled the whole group. The friendliness, the ease of hospitality
withdrew like a wave, as if a law of its being had forced it back into
the deep, yet nothing had happened, only a tall, well-dressed woman,
slightly swinging on her high heels, had stopped in front of Lucy. She
had liquid, dark brown eyes, thick black eyebrows, and very carefully
reddened lips. She smiled ingratiatingly at Lucy and said in a slightly
singsong voice, “Is this Mrs. Armstrong?”

Mabel Gosse said afterward that it was one of the worst moments of her
life.

There was nothing to be done about it but to introduce Lucy to Elvira
Loring.

Quite apart from the fact that nobody had expected—far less
wanted—Elvira to be there, Lucy looked like a new girl arriving at the
school welcomed by a kind headmistress, instead of like a dignified
headmistress being introduced to one of her own staff.

Besides, they all knew that Mabel was in the very act of inviting Lucy
to go home with her, instead of to King’s House. Mabel was to tactfully
explain to Lucy the intricate problems of Everslade, and how best to
deal with them, and here was its chief problem—Elvira Loring—cutting
in! Elvira would now carry this poor ignorant girl up the mountain,
giving her her own particular slant as to the situation—in the way that
was most favorable to herself.

Mabel Gosse had never liked Elvira Loring, and now she positively hated
her.

If she took them both home to lunch, which was what Sybil Moreton would
expect of her, Mr. Gosse might easily make a scene. He was more than
race conscious—he was race rabid, and had sworn that no matter what
King’s House might choose to do, he at least would never have a colored
person eat at his table. Elvira was very slightly, but unmistakably to
the Island, a colored person.

Judy Anstruther grinned wickedly. She enjoyed the situation because,
although she was Mabel’s devoted friend, she was also her social rival.
She actually knew the people at King’s House more intimately than Mabel
did, and had she been a member of the school committee, the question of
offering Lucy hospitality would have devolved on her. Bob kept a poker
face; all he cared about was to see that Lucy’s innocence did not put
her at a disadvantage.

Elvira Loring explained that she’d brought a car to take Lucy straight
back to the school; it seemed that she too had heard that Tommy had the
measles.

Mrs. Gosse, under the mocking eyes of her rival, thought out a
compromise.

“But you’ll lunch first,” she said, turning rather markedly to Lucy,
“with me at the St. George’s Hotel. There’s plenty of time for you to
reach Everslade by nightfall afterward.”

Lucy’s eyes passed from Mabel’s and rested upon Elvira’s.

“Thank you very much indeed. We _could_ do that, couldn’t we?” she asked
Elvira. It was clear that Lucy wasn’t going to accept any form of
entertainment that excluded Elvira. There hadn’t been any way of getting
out of it before, Mabel Gosse told herself, but if there had been, Lucy
Armstrong had gently but firmly closed it.

“Of course you’ll _both_ come,” Mabel said as graciously as she could
manage.

Judy and Bob, having maliciously watched her defeat, vanished in a cloud
of warmhearted farewells and prospective meetings.

But why, Lucy asked herself, should there have been that mysterious
pause and the obviously truncated invitation on Elvira’s appearance?

It was a question she continued to ask herself while she sat at a
beautifully decorated table overlooking a lawn as green and smooth as a
billiard cloth, beyond which the sea dazzled into colorless light
against the hard blueness of the sky.

Mabel Gosse ordered a careful lunch. She was a skilled hostess and could
hold her own against almost any social odds. But a prejudice no mere
skill could evade poisoned the charm of Lucy’s first lunch in the
tropics. Orange-headed canary birds weaved their mystic patterns in and
out of a flowering bush a few yards from her seat. Electric fans cooled
the hot scented air. Strange fruits and exquisite tropical flowers were
spread before her, and yet Lucy felt uncomfortably that _something_ was
wrong.

Their hostess, however hard she tried, appeared a little preoccupied and
vague. It was war to the knife between her and Elvira, because Mabel
meant to get hold of Lucy alone if it were only for five minutes, and
Elvira meant that she should not get hold of Lucy even for five minutes,
but Elvira’s knife never showed, while Mabel could not always hide the
edge of hers. She kept hoping that somebody in the vast, well-filled
dining room might turn up, on whom she could dump Elvira.

There were of course plenty of people whom she knew, but if she had
signaled to any of them to join her table, they would inevitably have
talked to Lucy and left Elvira to her. Slowly but surely Lucy realized
that Tommy’s having had the measles had upset a particularly precarious
apple cart. Elvira alone enjoyed the occasion. She looked her best. She
was lunching with one of the Island’s most famous hostesses and on the
other side of her was an honored guest whom everybody in the room
distinctly wished to meet.

Smoothly the whole drive of Elvira’s powerful will moved toward its
goal. She intended to make it impossible for Lucy to be parted from her
until they left for Everslade; and she succeeded.

At two o’clock, in a swirl of heat and dust amidst polite but cool
farewells, the hotel porter skillfully cleared a way for their small car
in the stream of cars driving up and driving off, from the Hotel.
Elvira, Lucy saw with relief, was a good driver. She not only knew how
to drive her own car, but she had an uncanny power of divining the
idiocies or willful knaveries of other drivers. Elvira was foolproof;
nor did she expect anyone else to drive quite as well as she did.




                             _CHAPTER III_


The little car jerked in an inspired fashion through the rickety,
disheveled streets. Irresponsible scavengers spilled from pavement to
roadway, skulking on the fringe of a prosperity they could never share.

Was this the life, Lucy asked herself, that went on behind the rim of
shining foam and graceful coconut palms presented to her so invitingly
from the ship, so far behind her already that it was hard to remember
she had ever been on her?

Was this island wavering toward bankruptcy a civilization coming to
birth, or a civilization crumbling into decay? Whose responsibility was
it? Whose interests were guiding it?

Clouds of slow-moving dust enveloped the traffic. Motor lorries looked
terrifyingly close, holding the middle of the road with greedy
determination. Donkeys carrying human freight, as well as baskets full
of fruit and vegetables, held their own against chance.

At incalculable intervals an antediluvian tram punctuated the crowded
streets with bloodthirsty shrieks and groans, moving on rails that
obstructed every form of vehicle except their own.

Suddenly the ramshackle houses and the ancient tram-way stopped
simultaneously. The road became shadowed by green trees. Larger houses
stood back from greener gardens.

Poinsettias, like bands of brigands, crowded to the edge of the road
with their spectacular javelins ready for any fray. Shrouds of
bougainvillaeas, orange, magenta, or bright crimson, flung themselves
over huge trees as if they wanted to smother them.

The traffic died into an interminable stream of natives from the hills,
carrying bundles on their heads with effortless ease. Their bright,
unchanging eyes stared straight in front of them. They moved as if their
bodies could never have enough of light and tranquillity. What did their
dark and shining eyes absorb? A girl spat in the direction of the car,
before the dust caught her. Young men shouted derisive jokes, and
children with obviously malevolent intent flung sticks and stones in
their direction.

Only old people greeted the two women in the car with courtesy, as if
they still lived in an unjostling past, where there was both time and
inclination for friendliness.

“Oughtn’t they to have paths for themselves,” Lucy asked, “and not just
be hustled into the gutter? We nearly killed that old woman.”

“I didn’t _quite_,” Elvira objected, “and I did slow up for her. She
should have seen us coming, but they’re utterly irresponsible, these
natives, as you’ll find out for yourself when you’ve been here longer.
They’re ignorant and careless, let alone hostile. Hardly one out of
every four goes to school, and when they do go, what are they taught
that helps to make them decent human beings? It’s simply awful at
Everslade trying to get hold of suitable servants. The intelligent girls
are too bored to stay there, and you have to pay even the stupid ones
impossibly high wages. They’re terribly immoral too, unless they’re
sickeningly religious—and even then you can’t be sure—a look or a
touch sets them off. They’re as inflammable as matchwood. It’s one of
our worst problems. Why, actually our own schoolgirls have had to help
with the housework! The girls in the annex, of course, don’t mind what
they do, but as I’ve often told Whiteleaf Ho Sung, their mothers and
fathers don’t pay us to have their daughters act as domestic servants.”

“The annex,” Lucy asked in a puzzled voice, “is the annex different from
the school?”

“That’s where they put the delicate girls,” Elvira explained, “most of
them come to school as well, but it’s all most awkward. No doubt you’ll
hear the committee’s version of it sooner or later, but I don’t see why
you shouldn’t hear my version now. After all, I’ve been in charge of the
school for two years since Miss Dawson resigned, but the worst of living
on this island is, hardly anything _can_ run on its own, or as a
separate institution—either the Government, or the new Constitution, or
else economic reasons mix everything up. Everslade ought to be either a
school or a convalescent home, it shouldn’t be both. And if it has to be
one, at least it shouldn’t be a Hydra-headed monster under dual control.

“Now we come to the foothills, and I am taking you rather a rougher and
longer way so that you can see our greatest waterfall. Do you see the
river through the logwood trees? We’re close to it now.”

There was so little sound that Lucy could hear the rustle and splash of
the waterfall long before she saw it. The dust track wound its way among
lichen-painted rocks, under strange, light-encircled trees. It was no
longer oppressively hot, though the sun bathed every leaf and dust
particle in deep, warm gold.

At a bend in the path the trees fell apart, and Lucy found herself
looking up at a cliff of falling water.

Straight as a pencil, from bank to bank, plunged the luminous chaos of
the falls. Rainbows hung above it precariously resting on the flying
foam. Below the cataract were clear golden brown pools in which shoals
of small transparent fish, with the sheen of moonlight on their bodies,
swept to and fro, while brightly speckled trout, alone and cautious,
glided from leaf shadow to leaf shadow, or hung poised under rocks as if
they were themselves shadows in the bright water.

On the opposite bank dense undergrowth closed a green door to whatever
lay beyond it.

Far enough away from the falls, so that they could hear each other
speak, Elvira laid out their tea on a rock, under the shade of a
gigantic silk-cotton tree.

“There’s such a lot I want to tell you,” Elvira said, “that I don’t know
where to begin. What do you want to know most?”

Lucy hesitated. She wanted to know everything, but she was not sure that
asking questions was the best way of finding out, and what she most
wanted to know was what kind of a person Elvira herself was.

“I’m not quite sure,” Lucy said at last. “But I _should_ like to know
what sort of bird that is with the aquiline beak that makes a sound like
a lost child and looks like a cross between a parrot and a crow.”

“That’s a Savannah blackbird,” replied Elvira a little impatiently,
because she hadn’t brought Lucy to this remote spot in order to discuss
birds. “I meant about the school. I couldn’t really tell you anything at
lunch because of Mabel Gosse, and she couldn’t either because of me, not
that she knows much to tell, but I suppose they sent her to explain
something!”

“Well then,” Lucy said consideringly, thinking as she ate what a
particularly nice and dainty tea Elvira had prepared for her, “before we
even get to the school, I should like to know why Mrs. Gosse asked us to
lunch at the hotel instead of her own home. I always thought planters
were so hospitable, and she didn’t say that any of _her_ children had
the measles.”

“So you noticed that, did you?” Elvira said. Her eyes flickered away
from Lucy’s toward the waterfall. She sat very still, almost as if she
were frozen against the rock. If Lucy had noticed that, Elvira thought,
she might notice anything, and she had begun to hope that Lucy would
only notice what she wanted her to notice.

“Don’t you really know why?” she murmured at last. “She took you to the
hotel instead of to her home—where no doubt she had intended to take
you—because she had to ask me as well as you—and I’m colored.”

“Oh!” Lucy exclaimed with a little gasp of horror. “But why—if you
are—should it make the slightest difference?”

Elvira was pleased at Lucy’s horror. If Lucy had a heart as well as an
intelligence, Elvira might find it easier to control both Lucy and the
situation.

“It makes _all_ the difference on the Island,” Elvira said with tragic
intensity. “For one thing it’s the reason they brought you over. You
see, I couldn’t be a real headmistress unless the children were all
black. I could only be a sort of deputy, and they found that wasn’t
quite enough.”

“I’m sorry,” Lucy said quickly, “they brought me over for any such
reason. I wouldn’t have come if I’d known. I think they ought to have
told me.”

“No doubt Lady Moreton meant to tell you herself—it was her idea to get
you over—and she’d have told you,” Elvira explained, “in such a way
that you couldn’t have objected. She’d have explained Whiteleaf Ho Sung
too, but you can’t, however tactful you are, or really kind, as I
believe she is, explain away everything.

“Whiteleaf has control of the annex and I have control of the school,
but she’s a teacher in the school and is under me in a sense, and yet
many of my girls live in her annex and there she is given complete
authority over them. Once they’re under her roof, to all intents and
purposes I lose them. Philip Calgary always supports her against me. It
isn’t as if I could possibly approve of her influence, either. She and
Philip Calgary are both mixed up with the Ransoms and they’re as Red as
Red can be—all of them—while I am passionately pro-British,
Anglo-Catholic, and Conservative. Yet it’s Whiteleaf that on the whole
the committee backs instead of me. If it wasn’t so cruel it would be
funny, because the British always take the side of the people on these
islands who want to get rid of them! Take Philip Calgary for instance.
Practically everybody accepts him, just because the Calgarys were well
off and gave him an English education.

“I dare say you don’t know yet, but in the slave days there was a law
against slaves marrying anybody, black or white. Yet white men often
lived here all their lives and wanted to found permanent homes, and
there weren’t nearly enough white women to go round. So they quite often
had their slave girls educated, freed them and made permanent homes with
them, and naturally left their land and money to their children.

“Philip Calgary belonged to one of these old half-planter,
half-freed-Negro families, and though he’s far darker than I am, he gets
accepted by the British just because of his family. If that’s not
disgusting snobbery, I don’t know what is. But as a matter of fact,
there’s hardly a planter’s family that’s been on the Island for over a
hundred years that hasn’t colored blood in it, only of course they won’t
admit it.”

Lucy was silent. She felt the bitter pain behind Elvira’s vehemence and
her own griefs had made her strangely vulnerable to pain. Yet she could
never feel very sure of facts presented to her with such vehemence.
There might, she felt, be something behind the vehemence as well as
behind the facts.

“What has Philip Calgary to do with the school?” Lucy asked finally.

“To do with it?” Elvira asked her incredulously. “Haven’t they even told
you that? Still it’s just like them really. I suppose they took it for
granted you wouldn’t notice him, except officially. He’s our doctor—the
only one at a possible distance, though he happens to be the best on the
Island as well, so in that sense we’re lucky. I don’t suppose Philip
Calgary would be so important to the school if the annex weren’t run by
Whiteleaf Ho Sung. He’s been her lover for years. Oh, it’s all quite
respectable on the surface! They’re tremendously careful and don’t meet
at the annex except before third people. In fact they always behave in
public as if they were only just introduced. But the whole Island knows
that they spend all their off time together.

“The committee pretend not to believe it, because they haven’t a
responsible matron to take her place. But no doubt it’s the reason they
didn’t put her in charge of the school as well—instead of me. They
hadn’t quite got the face to leave everything to her. Besides, either
the Bishop or the Admiral—let alone the old ladies—would have
objected! It’s a fact that (except the Bishop, who doesn’t like her
going to the MacTaggerts’ mission on account of their being
Presbyterians, and Miss Parr, who’s very loyal to the school—and as far
as that goes, to me) all the rest of the committee—and King’s House
into the bargain!—make a pet of Whiteleaf Ho Sung, and everything she
says is gospel to them. Personally I’ve no use for Asiatics. But you’ll
soon see for yourself.”

“It sounds quite incredible,” Lucy said slowly, picking her way
carefully between the confidences she had received and her own reactions
to them. “I don’t mean that I don’t believe you, but it’s so odd that
any such situation could have been allowed to exist. For how long has it
actually gone on?”

“For two years,” Elvira said bitterly. “Believe me it’s true, and a
thing can’t be too bad to be true—not on this island.”

“I almost wish you hadn’t told me,” Lucy said more slowly still, “and
that I didn’t know anything. You see, what they must want me for is to
make the school work, in spite of this very awkward and difficult
problem. I’ve been asked, I should think, to take over from you simply
because I’m an outsider and not involved in the personal relationships
which must have made it all so upsetting for you. There’s something,
however, I should like to know, if you don’t mind telling me. Were you
at all intimate with either of them before the situation arose?”

Elvira dropped her eyes before the candor of Lucy’s. Lucy could control
her expression because she never had to conceal anything. Her secrets,
if she had any, were comfortably innocent. Elvira’s were not.

“In a sense,” Elvira agreed grudgingly, “we were once friends. I knew
Philip Calgary years before I met Whiteleaf, for instance, we were in
more or less the same set, and I actually worked in Miss Parr’s school
with Whiteleaf for several months before we started at Everslade. I
didn’t dislike her then, but she isn’t easy to know; it’s when you _do_
know her that you dislike her.”

“There _are_ people like that,” Lucy agreed. “It doesn’t matter, of
course, but it does, I think, make a situation a good deal worse if
one’s been a real friend before—and then becomes an enemy.

“I’m sorry—I’m horribly sorry, Miss Loring, that I have had to replace
you. But I have got to warn you that my sympathy with you can’t alter my
behavior. I must be fair to the others. I must meet Miss Ho Sung as if
you hadn’t told me anything against her. You can’t be friendly in any
special sense, just because you’re sorry, can you? And you certainly
can’t show dislike to a person who has given you no grounds for it.”

Elvira’s eyes ran over Lucy’s face; her own were veiled by an expression
which Lucy could not read. Perhaps it was resentment at having given so
much confidence for so stingy a return. Perhaps there was even a hint of
derision in it.

Lucy could not be sure, but she felt unable to show more confidence in
Elvira than she had grounds for.

Whiteleaf Ho Sung was an unknown quantity. Philip Calgary, Lucy
dismissed entirely from her mind. He was not part of the school and his
relationship to Whiteleaf Ho Sung—if indeed it existed—was not Lucy’s
business. But Elvira and her problems could not be put aside. The
hostility between the two principal teachers in the school _was_ Lucy’s
business. It must be inimical both to the school and the annex.

“You’ll have to find out for yourself,” Elvira said after a silence.
“All I know is that I’m glad I’ve met you _first_. You see—until I saw
you—how could I believe you’d be—even fair to me? Now I know you will
be. And I should like you to know, Mrs. Armstrong, that I’ll do my best
to work loyally under you. Don’t think I mind too much about you being
put over my head either. For I’ve had a horrible time by myself, with
them both against me.”

“Well, you’ll not be by yourself now,” Lucy said, stirred beyond
precaution, “and I’ll be intensely grateful if you do feel that we can
work together.”

Elvira’s eyes swam in tears, and Lucy, though she believed that she was
not emotional herself, could not help being deeply touched by Elvira’s
emotion. She did not dream that what Elvira was saying to herself was,
“She must be at least ten years younger than I am.”




                              _CHAPTER IV_


The road beyond the waterfall climbed up the mountainside, and with
every twist and turn the Island became larger and more mysterious.

Cruel red mounds of erosion scarred the mountainside, but as if to give
them succor, groups of trees still cast their tropical luxuriance above
their battered surface. Trees with scarlet and orange chalices, pimento
trees with shining leaves, mango trees rich in smooth green foliage,
bread trees with leaves like the spread fingers of a hand, bananas with
their long loose shrouds, and high in the blue air, the stately feathers
of the coconut trees, filled the flowering landscape. Strange, musical
cries from unknown birds pierced the silence.

Talk between the two women became impossible; the uneven surface of the
road and its blind corners would have silenced the most reckless
motorist, but it seemed to Lucy that without speech the confidence
between them deepened.

All that Elvira had told her sank into Lucy’s consciousness with the
vividness and insecurity of a dream.

The day withdrew without darkness. The clear light that remained had a
hushed quality, as if it were receding before the approach of something
more formidable than itself.

Under the mountain ridge a sudden eyelid of land stretched before them,
upon which a large low house, covered with creepers, confronted the end
of the road.

“There isn’t anything else up here _but_ Everslade,” Elvira said,
stopping the car.

Across a stretch of rough green lawn poured a stream of dark children of
all ages and sizes. A wave of sheer terror swept Lucy. She longed to
turn the car and dash down the hillside, across the plain, and into the
first ship she could find. How could she ever reach or understand these
strange children, with their masklike faces? What lay behind their
queer, fluid presences? Even their voices had a shriller, more excitable
sound than those of white children. Why were they so frightening—or was
it because they themselves were afraid? They stood in groups beside the
big gateway, their eyes snapping with curiosity and excitement.

Elvira slipped out of the car, and with a mere wave of her narrow hand
swept the children to one side.

“Later, my dears, later,” she cried. “Poor Mrs. Armstrong is tired and
wants her tea!”

Elvira led Lucy through a mist of children across the darkening terrace,
on to a wide veranda set with chairs and tables.

“This is our staff room,” Elvira explained, “where we have our social
functions and entertain all our visitors—whenever we have visitors. But
you will have a special office room to yourself, of course.”

Elvira made another welcoming gesture with her narrow hands. The
children had melted away, and Elvira and Lucy stood alone on the great
veranda surrounding the creepered house. A brilliant ruby ring gleamed
on one of Elvira’s fingers, and her nails were lacquered the same blood
red. It suddenly occurred to Lucy that she didn’t like Elvira Loring’s
hands.

The staff came out on to the veranda, as if by a signal. Miss Penelope
Lestrange came first. She was by far the oldest woman in the house, a
dainty, withered, intensely shy old lady, who had never been able to
like other human beings unless they could understand Bach. A new
headmistress had a certain importance for Miss Lestrange, because she
might prove to be obstructive, or even to like jazz.

“Much too young,” she thought with disappointment, as her eyes took in
Lucy’s lithe young figure, “but probably not very important. Elvira will
see to that. I should think things would go on much as usual. After all,
she might be worse.”

Miss Lestrange put her clawlike hand into Lucy’s with something
approaching cordiality, though she withdrew it again as soon afterward
as possible. Behind her were the two Miss Myers. Rebecca was very
sallow, with marked features and a delicate air. She was in reality
extremely tough, but in order to appear to have a ladylike appetite in
public she ate rapaciously between meals. Highly strung, intelligent,
and without a natural vent for her strong emotions, she gazed hard at
the new headmistress, and having already made up her mind to dislike
Lucy, felt hatred flare up in her heart with unexpected ease.

Naomi was more delicate than her sister, less strongly marked as to
feature, and while equally intelligent, she was considerably more
emotionally stable. She did not dislike Lucy on sight. She reserved her
judgment and smiled cordially. If she could not go on as she began, at
least she would begin well, she told herself.

There was a pause before the door of the inner room opened, the light
clicked on, and revealed a small, beautifully neat Chinese lady.

Miss Whiteleaf Ho Sung came out onto the veranda very slowly. She had a
charming smile which exposed her small, even white teeth. Her pale,
primrose-colored skin was smooth as satin. She had features that were,
Lucy thought, probably exactly the right ones for a Chinese face. Her
liquid, almond-shaped eyes gleamed as if with pleasure. It was
impossible to guess how old or how young she was, but it would have been
a mistake to suppose that anything that took place escaped her. The hand
she held out to Lucy was minute, but its pressure was firm.

Behind her came a tray of iced drinks, brought in by a tall, upright
Negress. After introducing Miss Whiteleaf Ho Sung to Lucy, “This is
Adassa,” Elvira said affectionately. Adassa set down the tea tray with
careful skill, and then gazed with avid eyes at Lucy, taking her in from
head to foot. It was as if her glance ate what it rested on. Only when
she had finished looking at Lucy did Adassa smile.

“Miss Nancy Peck,” Elvira said a moment later, and in walked a plump,
pleasant-looking young woman, as dark as chocolate, with shining eyes
and teeth, and a suppleness of movement which seemed to go with the
alertness of her amused black eyes.

“Miss Peck,” Elvira explained, “is our P.T. exponent. We all look to her
as the man of the household—when the electricity fuses, or a window
won’t shut, Nancy immediately sets things going again.”

Miss Peck continued to smile, but her smile was directed solely to Lucy.
Her eyes seemed to skirt Elvira, as if she were not there. They talked
of Lucy’s voyage, English food rations, and of how difficult it was to
get the newest books or the best films on the Island.

Miss Lestrange wanted to know if Myra Hess played as well as she had
played before the war, or whether organizing concerts in the blitz
hadn’t spoiled her touch. Lucy said that people thought it hadn’t. Naomi
Myers bemoaned the degradation of German music.

“But it belongs to them,” Lucy objected. “I can’t help thinking that the
creative taste for music _will_ return to the German people if only they
can get rid of wanting to win wars.”

“Wagner and Liszt,” Miss Lestrange said sternly, “not to mention Strauss
and the trivial light music of Austria, vitiated the German taste. Nor
do I think Beethoven and Mendelssohn wholly guiltless.”

“But perhaps,” Miss Ho Sung said in a slightly shrill, but not
unpleasant voice, “people _need_ defeat and suffering in order to
produce art.”

Miss Peck looked uncomfortable at the idea of suffering being brought
into general conversation, and Miss Lestrange, who had looked at Lucy as
if she liked her, now looked away from her as if she didn’t. After tea
was over Elvira offered to take Lucy straight to her room.

“I’m sure you’re tired to death,” she said, “bumping over our impossible
roads. We have supper at seven. The girls can quite well wait till then
to meet you.”

A silence spread over the veranda and seemed to reach into the gathering
darkness. The teachers sat as if congealed on their chairs; the trade
wind rattled the large, dry leaves of the almond trees till they clashed
together like castanets in the hands of an unseen dancer.

Lucy, although she wanted nothing so much as to be alone in her room,
felt that Elvira was disposing of her rather too easily. She was putting
Lucy into her place, and there, once put, Lucy would remain. Elvira
intended to treat Lucy with the utmost tact and generosity. Whatever
glory there was in being outwardly the headmistress of Everslade, Elvira
would see that Lucy got, but the power would remain in those long,
narrow hands, already extended to guide Lucy out of the room.

Lucy suddenly realized that this was one of those disagreeable moments
when pleasing and being pleased must go by the board. She smiled her
sweetest smile, but she said with unmistakable firmness, “Oh, no thanks!
I’m not at all tired. Will you summon the girls together _now_, and I
will speak to them first, before I go up to my room. I don’t think I
ought to keep them waiting any longer.”

There was again a strange, long silence. A green lizard, fond of
silences, etched upon the wall, suddenly darted down across the veranda
floor and out into the garden, where it found a point of vantage upon an
almond tree.

It hardly mattered from there how much noise human beings made. But even
the lizard might have noticed how long it was before anybody broke that
particular silence.

“Oh, of course,” Elvira agreed at last, “but the only thing is that this
is their free time. I am not quite sure where all the girls are. It
might be difficult to bring them together at a moment’s
notice—unexpectedly.” There was a definite pressure in her voice and
eyes, rather than in the words she spoke.

“Let us count on their curiosity,” Lucy suggested, “and perhaps you have
a bell.”

“Yes indeed, we have a bell,” Miss Ho Sung told Lucy with swift
incisiveness, “and sound carries very far upon the hillside.”

“It shall be rung at once!” Elvira cried delightedly. She couldn’t have
said anything else, Lucy reflected, but she needn’t have said it, unless
she meant it, with delight.

In ten minutes a hundred girls sat before Lucy, their eyes popping out
of their heads. Most of them were dark. But among the African faces
there were a few spectacular white ones. A heavy-looking girl, half
Chinese and half African, stared at Lucy, her mouth open, her brows
meeting in a concentrated frown. It was a powerful, heavy, ugly face,
and Lucy felt a little afraid of it.

There were half a dozen very dark faces with delicate chiseled features
and straight black hair. Perhaps Indian, Lucy thought, or perhaps from
far back, Spanish blood had mingled with African, and had produced these
delicate Aryan features.

All the children’s eyes were glued on Lucy like flies to fly paper. Here
was not only their new headmistress, but amazingly, their new
headmistress looked like a princess out of a fairy tale, dainty and
small, pink and white, with bright hair and dark blue eyes. They all
knew instinctively that Lucy wore very smart clothes. Her voice was
clear and she spoke slowly, so that even the youngest child could
understand what she said.

Lucy told them she was a stranger to their Island, and she did not know
its ways. She hoped that they would show her as much as they could, and
explain what she didn’t understand. She told them that what she thought
of their Island and how she got on depended entirely upon them. It was
an appeal from one human being to the generosity of another, and as she
spoke Lucy could see their eyes change from the mere hardness of
curiosity to the welcome of hostesses.

She went on to tell them that though she was a stranger, she had not
come to them quite empty-handed. She came from another island—an old,
rich, friendly island, full of knowledge; and she had brought them some
of that knowledge.

If they wanted what she had to give them they could have it, and if they
wanted to give her what they had on their Island, she would be glad to
take it. Then Lucy smiled at them, and stopped. She had said exactly
what she meant to say, and it had not taken her five minutes to say it.
The applause was warm and eager, led by Elvira.

Lucy stepped down from the little platform, and going to each girl in
turn, shook hands with her and asked her name. Probably, she thought,
she wouldn’t be able to remember them all the first time, but the touch
of each small hand placed in her own, and the glance of the dark
friendly eyes, took away from Lucy once and for all the fear of the
children’s strangeness.

After all, she told herself, if a West Indian child was to come into a
crowd of white faces, like so many snow flakes, blanched and cold, how
queer and frightened that child might well feel! These children,
surrounding her, brimming with curiosity and unspent life, weren’t
queer, they were just like all other children.

“_My_ children,” Lucy said to herself, fiercely, and she was conscious
of fresh life surging through her, sweeping out of her heart the
deadness of her lost lovers.

Elvira gently touched her arm. “Here,” she said, “are the oldest girls,
who have just come in. I am so afraid they’ve missed your lovely speech.
They were too far away to hear the bell.”

Lucy turned, feeling somehow defeated, to meet the hard, unsmiling stare
of a tall English girl.

“This,” Elvira said, “is Margorie Fielding, our head girl, in whom we
all have very special confidence.”

Lucy saw her mistake in Margorie Fielding’s unsmiling eyes, and still
more plainly in the eyes of the girls who stood behind her. All these
elder girls shook hands stiffly with Lucy, and none of them smiled. Lucy
felt her own smile fix itself on her lips like a grimace. She was
confronting enemies. These girls had not wanted Lucy to come. They did
not like her now she had come. They were the head girls of the school,
and probably had more influence over the children than the teachers
themselves. Lucy saw that they meant to make her work a failure.




                              _CHAPTER V_


When Lucy woke she found the Island flaunting an uninterrupted beauty,
entirely unconcerned with man. The golden air was shot with songs of
birds and blown clean by the dawn wind. The mountain dropped from the
wide lawn’s edge in terraces, through deep ravines, filled with fruit-
and blossom-bearing trees into the feathery green plain. Beyond the
plain the sea stretched like a thin silver frame. No other dwelling
place was visible. A mocking bird with slate-blue wings rocketed its
swift body across Lucy’s balcony, shouting an urgent, unintelligible
warning.

A dark man in blue cotton, with a huge umbrella-shaped hat and
practically no nose, sauntered soundlessly across the terrace, drawing a
thin, reluctant cow after him. The sun in its golden density blotted the
figures out as if the light had swallowed them. Through a barrier of
flowering trees Lucy caught sight of the red roof of the annex.

All teachers find unknown pupils formidable, but Lucy knew that she must
face more than this general ordeal. There was enmity in the sleeping
household, and part of this enmity was directed toward herself. She was
unaware how far this hostility extended, or what were its real reasons.
The whole mentality of these island children was as strange to her as
the liquid, urgent calls of the brilliant birds darting beneath her
balcony.

She dressed quickly, trying to feel important and capable, and resolving
not to telephone Bob in order to slip back into the old atmosphere where
there were no unknown factors and where she could immediately grasp how
to settle problems. She decided to see all her staff separately in her
office before she faced the school.

Lucy’s first visitor was Miss Lestrange. Miss Lestrange came into the
pleasant shaded little office opening out on to the sweet-scented lawn,
as if there were a disagreeable smell to be avoided, and indeed to Miss
Lestrange, practically every human contact _was_ a disagreeable smell.
The only thing she could enjoy was the beauty of classical sounds. When
she was not actively engaged in studying or producing these, she found
it endurable to sit on a hard bench out of the sight of other human
beings, nibbling a dry biscuit and reading a weekly journal which
expressed disapproval of all that was going on without offering any
constructive alternative. Throughout her long life Miss Lestrange had
been shaken by no devastating emotions. She had once in her youth
greatly admired a labor leader, to whom she had never spoken, and she
clung to her mother’s memory with adoration and remorse, though they had
never got on well together during her mother’s lifetime. St. Anthony
might well have envied Miss Lestrange her immunity from all tempting
visions. She accepted the ten commandments with undeviating persistency,
in spite of the fact that she regarded the existence of a deity as
highly problematical.

Miss Lestrange had seen quite enough of Lucy the night before to resent
having to talk to her about anything so sacred as her work, for she
rightly guessed that the new headmistress was not a trained musician.
Lucy began their interview by saying that she had never heard before an
Amen so beautifully sung after a grace, without accompaniment.

Miss Lestrange felt a slight inclination to unbend, but she corrected
it. She reminded herself that people who began a conversation with a
compliment were very seldom sincere.

“What do you think,” Lucy asked her, “of these island children’s
capacity for music? They seemed, I thought last night, to have lovely
voices. Do you think they can be cultivated into real musical talent?”

“Real musical talent is extremely rare,” Miss Lestrange replied in a
repressive voice. “Forcibly deported Africans have lived on this island
for three hundred years, and are its main inhabitants. They have no
language of their own, and as far as I know, have only produced one
tolerable song—‘Linstead Market.’ Songs usually devolve from natural
speech and self-chosen customs; these people have had none. No doubt the
Island owes this particular song to the only free activity that as a
slave people the Africans were permitted to enjoy. The slave owners
discovered that it was cheaper to let their slaves grow their own
vegetables; and as they grew more than they needed for themselves, they
were allowed to go once a week to Linstead Market to sell the rest.
After the Saturday market it was too late for many of them to find their
way home, so they used to spend the night very uncomfortably and, no
doubt, very immorally, upon the hillside, often having been unable to
sell anything before returning home. That is where and how this song was
composed. I am not particularly fond of Negro spirituals, still I think
we must admit they are a form of music, and I should describe ‘Linstead
Market’ as of that nature.”

“I thought last night,” Lucy ventured, “when I heard the children
singing, that their voices sounded freer and richer than ours.”

“All children enjoy making a noise,” Miss Lestrange answered dryly. “No
doubt these girls have fewer inhibitions than white children. They are,
I find, as intelligent on the whole, though perhaps that is not saying
very much. I try to teach them that music is an exact science, not a
mere emotional display. Girls can seldom refrain from a desire to show
off. Boys sing with much greater purity of tone, but this may very
likely be due to the fact that they seldom care greatly for music and
have sufficient vent for showing off in their sport life.”

Lucy could not help smiling at the way in which Miss Lestrange uttered
the word “sport” as if an inherent obscenity were attached to it. Miss
Lestrange let the corner of her mouth twitch to meet Lucy’s smile. She
was even beginning to enjoy the conversation.

“And instrumental music,” Lucy asked. “Do they learn that with you as
well?”

“I teach them to torture the piano in the usual way,” Miss Lestrange
grimly admitted, “and I have, I hope, succeeded in proving to them that
the hard pedal down will not prevent my hearing false notes. Two girls
are learning the violin. Their parents insist upon it, and the results
are extremely painful. Fortunately the music room is at some distance
from the rest of the house. That mixed Chinese and African girl has some
musical talent. She plays the flute. I myself play the cello, and we
occasionally try some orchestral music. I can’t say it is at all
satisfactory, but we have very little time for practice. What time we
might use Miss Loring takes in order to teach the girls what I believe
is known as ‘crooning.’ This they enjoy very much, as they never have to
go anywhere near the center of a note.” There was the faint hint of a
grudge in Miss Lestrange’s last remark which Lucy felt for the moment it
was wiser to sidetrack though she determined later on to find out its
source.

“What do you think crooning comes from?” she asked instead. “We used to
croon a lot in the Services.”

“Did you?” Miss Lestrange answered, blinking rapidly and fixing her eyes
afterward on the tips of her rather shabby, blunt-toed shoes. “Well, I
always supposed crooning came from cats. The Puritan instinct was, no
doubt, indirectly responsible for a period of repression, now over, and
yowling is the symptom of the extreme to which, I believe, it swung.
Crooning is, of course, sound, but I don’t quite see why it should be
connected with music. An electric drill is sound, but we are not yet
obliged to listen to it on the radio.”

“Oh,” said Lucy. “Well, I must admit I hadn’t thought of crooning like
that. You see, with us, in the Services, in canteens and camps and
lonely huts, it was such an anodyne. Perhaps repression of some sort
_was_ behind it. We were most of us deprived during the war of our
natural life.”

Lucy stopped, for she saw that Miss Lestrange had ceased to be
interested. She did not want to hear what people felt about natural
life. Lucy quickly changed the subject.

“I didn’t know Miss Loring taught music,” she said after a pause.

“No,” Miss Lestrange replied, moving her feet under her chair, as if
even the indulgence of having them to look at was too great a concession
to emotion. “Not music, I think, but she gives the elder girls several
hours a week for this particular indulgence. Miss Loring, you will find,
is an active and brilliant mistress. She assists all of us in carrying
out our duties.”

Lucy shot a quick inquiring glance at Miss Lestrange, but the face
confronting her remained rigidly and completely inexpressive.

Miss Rebecca Myers followed Miss Lestrange. She explained that she
taught the younger girls their main subjects, but what she managed most
to convey to Lucy was that she belonged heart and soul to Miss Loring.
All her sentences were indications of the loyal desire which seeped
through them: that Miss Loring, not Lucy, should be seated in a room
sacred to her presence. The flowers on Lucy’s desk should have been
offered up to another deity. Her duties and her bread and butter kept
Rebecca upon the edge of the hard chair she had chosen, while she
directed her resentful eyes to the figure she didn’t want to see.
Certainly she would give Lucy all the information that she wanted. She
was there to be asked questions and to answer them, but she wasn’t there
to enjoy herself or to contribute to Lucy’s enjoyment. Protest moved in
her restless fingers, and sounded in every tone of her dry, husky voice.
She taught more children more subjects than any other teacher, and Lucy
thought what she would teach them most was that they would be better off
without Lucy and with Elvira Loring.

“But after all,” Lucy thought to herself, “it’s not surprising that
she’s loyal to anyone so nice as Elvira.”

Rebecca Myers eyed Lucy’s clothes with particular displeasure. She was
herself one of those young women whose garments never seem their own.
Everything they wear enters into a conspiracy to betray them. If they
possess slips, they show beneath their skirts, if stockings, they
wrinkle. If shoes, their laces come, and remain, unfastened. Their
lipstick strays from their lips; their face powder stands well away from
any portion of their faces it was meant to cover, and makes a floury
background for noses redder than they need be. All these misadventures
had occurred to Rebecca simultaneously this morning, and though Lucy
felt sorry for her, she thought she should have cleaned her spectacles.
When Lucy’s questions stopped Rebecca swallowed nervously, got up to go,
and then sat down again, as if an irresistible pressure rested upon her
shoulders.

“I’m sure,” she said breathlessly, “that it’s not your fault, and I dare
say I oughtn’t to speak of it. We know you were sent here, and we shall
all do our best to help you as Miss Loring has told us. We quite
understand the position because Miss Loring has explained it over and
over again, but if you only knew how well we got on here, with Miss
Loring as our head! She _knows_ us so well you see, and she knows just
what we _can_ and _can’t_ expect from the girls. I thought I must just
tell you this because she would never let you know herself, and it can’t
but make a difference, can it? And then your being so much younger than
Miss Loring—than _all_ of us, if it comes to that. I don’t mean to be
rude, but I’ve had it on my mind to tell you what my feeling is, once
and for all!”

Rebecca took her handkerchief, which she had been twisting in her hands
as if it were the neck of something she wanted to wring, and used it to
wipe the rest of her lipstick onto her chin.

“And then, of course,” she added, while Lucy still remained silent,
“there’s Whiteleaf Ho Sung. She hasn’t any business to keep our girls at
the annex as long as she does, or to interfere in what Elvira thinks
best for them. You can’t think how Miss Loring has suffered! She was
_made_ to suffer. But there are people here who wouldn’t _stand_ it if
Elvira were made to suffer any more.”

“I don’t know why anyone here _should_ be made to suffer,” Lucy said
gently. “I am sure Miss Loring is a peculiarly gifted, intelligent
woman, and I am delighted to have her as my chief colleague. You know,
our kind of work goes much better when we each tackle our special tasks
in our own way and don’t bother about who comes first. I don’t believe
people can teach to order, and as long as the children like their
lessons enough to learn them you may be very sure I shan’t have to
interfere with anybody. As for Miss Ho Sung, we shall have to work out
together what the rules for the annex ought to be, and no doubt Miss
Loring will help us.”

She paused. Rebecca got up again and went as far as the door. There she
turned back and looked at Lucy with increased aggressiveness, as if the
feel of the door handle helped her.

“My sister Naomi,” she observed belligerently, “doesn’t agree with me at
all.”

“Well,” Lucy said, smiling in as friendly a manner as she could, “I
often don’t agree with my sister either.” But this, she saw from
Rebecca’s vehement headshake, wasn’t at all what she was meant to say.
Before she could think of anything wiser Miss Nancy Peck came through
the veranda window and reminded Lucy that she was the P.T. mistress.

Miss Peck was shining with health. The whites of her eyes were
dazzlingly clear, and her teeth matched them. Her smile was full of
vitality and friendliness. She sat down in a chair near Lucy, but she
didn’t look as if she were used to sitting down. Her every movement came
from limbs that were in perpetual training for motion. Miss Peck wasn’t
in a hurry. She was simply easy, and whatever effort had been required
of her she would have been equally easy in her fulfillment of it. She
looked as neat and spruce as if she had taken her short white skirt and
open shirt straight from the ironing board, although she had worn them
for several strenuous hours.

“I hope you’ll like our island—and us,” she said in a rich contralto
voice. It was exactly what Lucy wanted to hear somebody say. Miss Peck
talked for ten minutes about her work, and at the end of that time Lucy
felt strangely brisker than she had felt at the beginning of it. Nancy
Peck had mentioned neither the annex nor Miss Loring. Nancy Peck, Lucy
thought, would treat almost any problem as if it were a rubber ball
capable of being bounced in any direction, and if it were necessary to
catch such a ball, at however difficult an angle it was presented,
Nancy’s large, well-proportioned hands would close over the flying
missile with imperturbable accuracy.

Miss Whiteleaf Ho Sung was the last of Lucy’s visitors. She slipped into
Lucy’s room with the smoothness of water rounding a curve, and smiled at
Lucy with enchanting grace; with just such grace, however, she might
have smiled at her executioner. Whiteleaf Ho Sung could have been cut up
into fragments without a single piece being discovered that was not
composed of controlled courtesy.

Lucy felt very young and inexperienced under Miss Ho Sung’s cool
polished eyes. The strong small hands resting motionlessly in Miss Ho
Sung’s lap seemed capable of lifting anything.

“I hope,” she said, “that you have slept well on our beautiful island
and that the dawn brought you its freshest thoughts. We hope very much
that when you have inspected what is nearer home you will visit the
annex. We shall be very pleased to welcome you.”

“Thank you,” Lucy said, flushing a little. “The dawn did bring me
thoughts, but I am afraid, although the Island is beautiful, there are
many problems left unsolved.”

Miss Ho Sung’s smile deepened. “We have a saying in China,” she
observed, “‘Life is a procession of problems, but only human beings are
their own problems.’ You have been a very short time on this Island, and
you will find that there is a great deal of time in which to solve our
problems.”

“How long have you been here?” Lucy asked her.

“Nearly eight years,” Miss Ho Sung replied, “and before that for three
years in America. I wished to learn to think in English as well as in
Chinese.”

“I’m afraid,” Lucy murmured hesitantly, “that I do not know anything
about your two subjects, mathematics and physics.”

“You do not need to know them, since you do not teach them,” Miss Ho
Sung said pleasantly. “Your own subjects, we are aware, you have
thoroughly mastered.”

There was a pause between them. A ray of sunlight escaped the Venetian
blinds and played upon the immaculate neatness of Miss Ho Sung’s simple
white dress. It was cut on severe lines and fitted her like a sheath.
Her feet were very small and her legs slim and delicately formed. She
wore spotless white suède sandals, and no stockings.

“Do you have time enough for your classes?” Lucy asked at last, “and are
they arranged in the way that suits you best?”

Miss Ho Sung smiled again. “If you will excuse my saying so,” she said,
“your questions are both kind and wise. I should indeed be glad of half
an hour extra every day for my backward girls. I find it discouraging
for girls to feel backward. If I had them by themselves away from the
intelligent ones, I think I could lessen this discouragement.”

“We must certainly try to arrange that,” Lucy said eagerly. “I think it
sounds a splendid plan. Every child should have a chance to learn all
she can.”

“Yes,” Miss Ho Sung said in her shrill, clear voice. “But I find
sometimes that good plans are not easy to carry out. Even nature does
not give full chances to every child, and there are many human beings in
authority who are more stingy than nature.” There was another pause.
Miss Ho Sung seemed to consider pauses in conversation as natural as
speech. Her ease was so static that it almost frightened Lucy. It was as
if Miss Ho Sung could communicate with stones, the outsides of books, or
the ray of light across her dress, just as easily and perhaps more
profitably than with Lucy herself.

“Do you—do you like West Indian people?” Lucy ventured at last.

“Do I like fish?” Miss Ho Sung replied laughingly, spreading her little
fingers out as if they were fins and she was trying them for the first
time in a pool, “or dogs or birds, or Englishmen? Yes, some, others
not—that is the way I like West Indians. But I like very much that you
call them West Indians. They do not like to be called Negroes, or even
Africans, though they came from Africa, since _as_ Africans they were
used as slaves.”

“But they can’t _remember_ being slaves,” Lucy replied a little
impatiently. “It’s over a hundred years since they were all freed.”

“Yes, in 1838,” Miss Ho Sung said softly, “and even now what are they
freed for? To be destitute? To be uneducated? To be sick? They have so
little of their own on their Island—these dark ones—only what belongs
to other people. No language, no tradition, no religion—even as a rule,
though they cultivate them, no bananas! All the rich island produce goes
away on ships! The people themselves carry onto the ships the best
fruits of their Island and watch them go! I sometimes wonder what is in
their hearts that _is_ their own. The tongue perhaps still has its old
twist for forgotten words. These people have had to learn always from
the speech of others—other men’s habits too have been forced upon them,
but never other men’s chances. Forgive me, but Anglo-Saxons do not often
think of either Asiatics or Africans very thoroughly.”

Lucy frowned. She had grown up on an island, and in a tradition of
patriotic snobbery. She felt warmly and kindly toward those whom she
believed to be her inferiors. She wanted to do right by them, more
scrupulously and with greater effort than if she had thought them her
equals. Michael would have expected it of her and Lucy expected it of
herself. Slavery, of course, was terrible, but she felt that the British
Empire had led the world in abolishing slavery, and should have full
credit for its generosity. Lucy thought Miss Ho Sung might well have
overlooked those two hundred years when England profited by her use of
slavery.

“No,” Miss Ho Sung went on with smiling firmness in spite of Lucy’s
frown. “Very few of your fellow countrymen think of other people
scientifically. They think we are funny or ugly or dirty. They do not
think of us as similar human beings who have, by chance, come under
other influences, geographical or historical, or perhaps religious. Nor
perhaps do you sufficiently regard what we think of you in return. Take
the United States, for instance. To us, lipstick and lynching seem a
superficial type of civilization, or take the British—Asiatics cannot
forget the Amritsar massacre, or that terrible lane where human beings,
innocent and honorable human beings, were forced to crawl on all fours
like dogs! To an Asiatic, such names as Jallinanwala Bagh prepared the
way for Guernica and the Belsen camps. It is not only the Nazis who
behave like Nazis, is it? I do not wish to sound political, Mrs.
Armstrong, yet if you intend to understand this Island—and I see with
admiration that you really wish to understand it—then you must
understand the feelings of its people.”

Lucy hesitated. She didn’t want to remind Miss Ho Sung of Kipling, but
after all, these were backward people who had to be controlled by more
civilized ones, and the British _were_ more civilized than Africans. She
could explain all this better to Miss Ho Sung later on when she had
looked up the facts. Meanwhile she said in rather a pained voice, “I
always thought we got on so well with the Chinese.”

Miss Ho Sung regarded Lucy with the same unwavering, courteous smile.
“Yes, indeed,” she said cordially. “But better still with the Japanese,
we thought, while we were fighting single-handed against them, without
the Burma Road, and at some disadvantage, since after the last war you
gave the Japanese as prizes for their bloodless control of the Pacific
all those islands which were our points of vantage or which could be
turned against us. Also, in China we did not care much for the rights of
extraterritoriality, nor that Hong Kong should remain a part of that
mysterious entity, the British Empire. These were, to us, painful
idiosyncrasies on the part of our foreign guests.”

Miss Ho Sung laughed gaily, as if the subjects of their conversation
were a series of nice little jokes. Lucy found herself laughing with
her, but she didn’t agree with Miss Ho Sung of course; she thought Miss
Ho Sung must be a Red.

Lucy reminded herself of her own position and said decisively, after a
friendly little pause, “I rather think education and politics had better
be kept apart.”

“Do you?” said Miss Ho Sung. “Then you disagree with the Athenians, who
thought every child must be either a politician or an idiot?”

“Athens was a smaller and simpler world,” Lucy pointed out with smiling
firmness. Miss Ho Sung did not answer Lucy except with a little gesture
of farewell, a charming gesture, as if she were presenting Lucy with
something rather than taking it away.




                              _CHAPTER VI_


At the classroom door Lucy met Elvira. Elvira’s hands were outstretched,
holding a freshly picked spray of gardenias, touched with dew.

“These will look beautiful on your shoulder,” Elvira murmured, “it is
not often that you find five perfect blossoms on a stem.”

Lucy submitted to Elvira’s decorating hands. The firm velvety white
petals gave up an intense possessive fragrance.

Elvira smiled down at Lucy with a smile like the Mona Lisa’s, as if she
had a secret, a serene and genial secret which she was willing to
impart.

“Yes, I’m afraid,” Lucy whispered, answering the hint of a question in
Elvira’s eyes.

“But not _too_ afraid,” Elvira said, her smile deepening. “That in your
case wouldn’t be necessary. There—now you look perfect—go in and
triumph.”

The door closed softly behind Lucy as she stood alone, facing the
school.

The old drawing room of Everslade ran the length of the house. The high
French windows shaded with orange awnings, opened out on to the terrace.
What air there was blew across the long lines of desks where the whole
school was gathered to receive Lucy’s first lesson. There was a quality
of intense life and vigor in these dusky, dynamic children. Their
parents had already gone far in the pursuit of culture, to make up for
social disadvantages.

Out of the alien speech and manners which had been thrust upon them only
a few generations ago, the children wanted to gain a quality that was
universal which would put them into a position in which they no longer
felt any sense of inferiority. They were asking themselves, with their
eyes glued to Lucy as closely as flies to a fly paper, would she bestow
this quality on them? Would she be friendly, or despise them? Would she
give them the chance, their swiftly beating hearts demanded, to show her
they were not to be despised?

Lucy hesitated for a moment. The orange awnings shut out the sight of
the distant sea, the flowering trees and the tremendous golden world
beyond the classroom door. She had a feeling that she must bring this
world, its glitter and its liveliness, even its dangers, into whatever
she was going to teach them.

She thought, “I will tell them a story first. A sea story, because they
are surrounded by the sea.” And she opened a book of poems she had
brought in with her, and turned the leaves till she found “The Ancient
Mariner.”

Every girl in the room listened with the wedding guest to the sailor’s
story.

Even the front row of girls, although they contrived to look, under
Margorie Fielding’s leadership, remote and inaccessible, listened.

They saw the ship with its white sails flying before the trade wind on a
blue, unfrowning sea. They saw the white-winged bird that “every day,
for food or play, came to the mariners’ hollow.”

On the vast empty sea he was their messenger of life, the symbol of
their hopes and their security; and to the bird these sailors were a
special, friendly Providence. At first all went well, the voyage was
fair; the winds and sunny sky were at the ship’s service. But mists and
rain came later, and now the bird became a symbol of discontent and
insecurity. It was the same bird, and one could look at it either way,
Lucy explained to them. The bird was looking only one way at the
ship—it was where food came to him, where men were his friends, where
his winged life was safer than if he had been alone upon the empty seas.

Out of the gloomy thought in one sailor’s mind came a black deed. He
shot the albatross. His fellow mariners were at first horrified by his
crime, but after it the weather unaccountably cleared up and everything
seemed to conspire to make their voyage better than before, so they
praised the murderer for his crime. Still, perhaps none of them felt
quite easy about it, or as if they had come to the end of the
consequences of this bad act. They must have liked the bird for its own
sake, too, because there was a real relationship between themselves and
this other living thing.

Suddenly the wind fell and they found themselves becalmed and lost upon
a barren sea. No movement was possible to them any more. “She lay as
idle as a painted ship, upon a painted ocean.”

The sun struck at them all day long; at night there was no dew. Their
water supply failed. In their anger and agony they tied the dead bird
around the Mariner’s neck and cursed him. The man who had shot the bird
felt it was his fault. He not only suffered himself, but he had to watch
the sufferings of all the crew. They died one by one of thirst, and he
was left alone on this becalmed and tideless sea. Torturing dreams
pursued him through days and nights of ghastly thirst and loneliness. He
saw visions of phantom ships in which skeletons diced for his soul.

In a strange moment of understanding and pity, watching the sea serpents
he could see in the fathomless, glassy water, playing together, he
blessed them for their joy and their companionship. Instantly pity and
forgiveness in a flood poured over his soul. The albatross dropped from
his neck, and his murderous act, which had brought agony and death to
the whole ship, was by some unseen hand swept into penitence and
remorse. A seraph stood by each dead man; dew fell from the sky to give
him drink. The sailor felt relief from his remorse, as well as finding
practical assistance in sailing the ship back to the harbor.

The children listened breathlessly. Lucy’s clear, persuasive voice lit
each verse she quoted into a picture. They saw the ship thinning beneath
the tropical skies into a specter in the drought. They, too, knew how
drought could make ghosts of human beings. They felt the sudden act of
cruelty to the harmless bird as if it had happened to themselves.

Children accept punishment naturally when it is natural and the crime is
real. Still more easily they understand redemption. Relief rushed to
them from the Mariner’s inadvertent mercy to the water snakes.

He had wanted to be unkind because he was miserable—so he shot a bird.
Now he was mysteriously more miserable still—he wanted to be kind and
blessed a water snake. It was quite the right story, Lucy saw, as she
watched their sparkling eyes while the children took the shock of
Coleridge’s great poem for the first time.

The quality of Myra O’San’s attention stood out from the rest; it was
like the shout of a drowning man for help. She sat crouched over her
desk, her frowning brows bent over her slanting eyes, intent on catching
each word as it fell.

The room was very quiet. Outside on the terrace the noon heat had closed
down. Even the mocking birds were silent. The children, caught by the
spell of the poem, sat motionless.

Once more Lucy hesitated. Had Coleridge, she asked herself, made his
hero escape too easily from the responsibility of his act? The broken
and contrite heart has its moment of vision, and can create a new life
from it, but the consequences of moral disaster are as irrevocable as
falling over a precipice. The heart can never restore what has been lost
by its act. God had stepped into Coleridge’s poem. The albatross had
fallen from the Mariner’s neck. Seraphs had taken the place of the dead
men. The ship had reached her port. It was true, the Ancient Mariner
still felt a compulsion to explain the whole story occasionally at
rather inappropriate moments to strangers, otherwise he had escaped any
further penalties attached to his crime. But there was somehow a deeper
truth that was more universal in the poem. From it, and in it, there was
no escape. Meeting the children’s eyes, Lucy felt the words rush up out
of her heart. The book slipped from her hand. Leaning across the desk,
she said to them, as if they were her own, the words that came to her
lips:

                 “‘He prayeth best, who loveth best
                 All things both great and small;
                 For the dear God who loveth us,
                 He made and loveth all.’”

Every child in the room, except the oldest girls in the front row, was
glad that one of the greatest English poets knew that God loved them all
alike; and each one of them felt sure of Lucy, because she felt the
same.

Margorie Fielding, in a tone of studied insolence, broke the silence.

“Is that supposed to be Coleridge’s _best_ poem?” she demanded.

“I don’t know if it is his best,” Lucy answered quietly, “but it is
considered to be, I think rightly, one of the finest poems in the
English language.”

“It _is_ a fine poem!” Myra said suddenly, in a loud, harsh voice. “It
hurts you. You are angry with it. You see always in yourself what
happens, so it is fine. Perhaps not altogether true about the seraphs.
They may have only been fear and thirst—like a mirage in a desert. You
really do see water that isn’t there. But what the poet _meant_ when he
wrote the poem—all that is true—any fool could see that!”

“Nonsense,” Margorie Fielding said contemptuously. “It seemed to me the
whole poem was completely made up, like a fairy tale.”

The hour was over, yet Lucy did not ring the bell. She waited with her
eyes on Myra’s face. The girl sat staring, curiously enough, not at
Margorie, who had spoken to her, but straight at Lucy.

“I can tell that the poem is true,” Myra O’San said at last. “Anyone
who’s been afraid would know that!” and she repeated:

                “‘Like one that on a lonesome road,
                Doth walk in fear and dread,
                And having once turned round, walks on,
                And turns no more his head;
                Because he knows, a frightful fiend
                Doth close behind him tread.’”




                             _CHAPTER VII_


Myra edged her way, as inconspicuously as possible, through groups of
excited, chattering girls, toward the lavatory. It was difficult to get
out of the window, which had not been built as an exit for a large,
rather clumsy girl of fifteen, but if she had gone the ordinary way
across the garden to the annex, Elvira or one of her myrmidons might
have stopped her.

She stood on the seat, cautiously twisted the upper part of her body
through the window, and, clinging to the narrow ledge outside, hoisted
herself through. Lowering herself carefully, she dropped onto the hard
earth six feet beneath her. The drop jarred her spine, but she had got
there. Now she was perfectly safe. She had cover from bush to bush until
she reached the vine-covered veranda surrounding the annex. A moment
more, and she stood in Whiteleaf’s workroom.

“You should not have come here at this hour,” Whiteleaf said, her
delicate eyebrows lifted in reproach, but her eyes shining with
kindness. “Have you forgotten how only on your father’s insistence were
you allowed to live here out of school hours—and these you must never
break? This is a school hour. If we do not keep our side of the bargain
we cannot expect Miss Loring to keep to hers.”

“But what I have come to tell you is so important,” Myra said urgently.
“It is more important than bargains. Before she comes over here to see
you you must know what this new English lady is like! She is not—she
need never be—an enemy. In the lesson she gave us I knew suddenly that
she is good! She understands us so everything will be all right!”

“If she understands—yes!” Whiteleaf replied. “Each of us understands
what he thinks it is his interest to understand. But it is our interest
also to understand those of other people—as _they_ understand them.
This knowledge seldom reaches us!”

Myra shook her head vehemently. “But she is like that—that is what I
mean!” she explained with eagerness. “She is not shut into a box with
herself. Though her eyes are round and such a queer deep blue, yet they
have a kind light! Even at me she smiles!”

“You must not say ‘even at me,’” Whiteleaf said sternly. “You are a
good-hearted, intelligent girl, there can be no difficulty in smiling at
you!”

“My ugliness _is_ a difficulty,” Myra replied firmly. “I have often said
to myself, Why did God make me so hard to look at? He couldn’t have
known what it was like to be a girl with a bulgy forehead, a chocolate
skin, the eyes of a pig, and a wide-open nose, or he would not have
created me as I am. Perhaps an octopus does not mind what it looks like,
or a shark. They don’t have to be loved. It is easier for them.”

Whiteleaf Ho Sung was silent for a moment, then she said: “These other
girls who seem to you so much nicer to look at can only be pretty for a
few years in this hot climate, but if you do well at school you can be
intelligent all your life, and if you have a pleasant spirit your face
becomes pleasant too. Your father is a successful tradesman on this
island, a very wise man who has no son; he will expect you to take his
place and carry on his business after him. It is true that to be
beautiful is a wish in every woman’s heart. But to attract men makes you
a thrall to their wishes. You are shaken away from life when you long to
attract. Cease to long for this and you will find yourself strong enough
to face anything—even your own ugliness. Besides, ask yourself what has
it really denied to you, to be ugly. You communicate your spirit through
your face, just as if it were beautiful. You have earned by your spirit
the love of your father, my love, Philip’s love—I might say the love of
everyone in this annex. So what more do you want? Are you not rather a
greedy child? Go back now carefully so that no one sees you, and do not
break a rule again in order to tell me what I hope I have sense enough
to find out for myself.”

Myra hung her head. Her heart, though vaguely comforted, was not wholly
at rest. “But will Philip know?” she demanded. “Can you tell him in time
before she comes? Will he see her when he comes? He can be very proud,
Philip, or he can be very kind. Which will he be to her?”

Whiteleaf said slowly and thoughtfully, “He will see her. She comes over
during his hour. This happens by accident, but it was necessary they
should meet. He also has sense. Let us hope he will use it to judge her
rightly. But, Myra, there is one thing we must all remember, you and
Philip and I, if this English lady understands us and gives us her
friendship, have you thought what may happen to her? Elvira will then be
her enemy. Many disagreeable things might happen to her, whereas if she
were not to be our friend she would still be perfectly safe. For none of
us would wish to do her harm.”

Myra thought this over with some dismay, then she shook her head. “We
will not let things happen to her,” she said sturdily. “I think it was
because I was a little afraid that I had to come so quickly to tell you.
I could not wait till after you and Philip had talked to her. I felt
what she was like in the poem story she told us, about the man who
killed the albatross. You cannot have everything and be safe, though she
thinks you can! There are some people you must _not_ love—people who
kill albatrosses—like Elvira Loring. She would be just as unsafe if she
were not your friend. It does not say in the poem that the man who shot
the friendly bird had not first fed it every day like the other sailors
did.”

“Such things do happen,” Whiteleaf admitted, after a pause, “but perhaps
it is not our business to believe evil of Elvira Loring. To behave like
a comrade always is what we need to know. Not to judge others. Go now,
and quickly!”

When Myra had gone, Whiteleaf left her desk and looked out into the noon
sunshine. The garden was empty and it was too hot for even the canaries
to sing. This girl, Whiteleaf thought—this European with the pink and
white face, with her heroic record—would make a difference. The gulf
between the school and the annex that was to be bridged by her—would it
not be safer, she asked herself, _not_ to bridge it? She and Philip had
drawn a moat around the annex. Elvira hated them, but she was a little
afraid of them, she left them alone, but now this extra weight that must
come down on one side or the other, this new authority which was to bind
them together—what new friction, what new complications might the
Englishwoman not innocently cause?

“Yet it is right that I should know, and that Philip should know, that
she _is_ innocent!” Whiteleaf told herself sternly. “Rigid, but
innocent, as they so often are, these good English people, so
privileged, so prejudiced, so far away from what belongs to the rest of
us: our basic insecurity!”

She sighed a little before she turned back to the immaculate small world
she had made for the sick children in her charge.

The annex was not only in perfect order, it was brilliant in its
neatness. Whiteleaf had made beauty out of order. Whether you looked at
the flowers or at the sterilized instruments, shining under glass covers
in the tiny, spotless theater, or at the eight children each in her bed
with her own toys beside her; everything had equal beauty and every
child was so tended and cared for, body and spirit, that she made a
contented picture in spite of the fact that three had tubercular
abscesses, four shook and burned with malaria, and the eighth lay
stiffened with poliomyelitis, so that almost nothing in that young and
lovely body made for activity could move at all. Henriette and the
abscess children had their beds moved out onto the veranda every day
where they could see and hear everything in the garden together, and
pour their lives into the flying birds or the wavering butterflies, but
the malaria children lay in their little darkened rooms with wide-open
windows, carefully shaded from the sun. As soon as the chills and fever
were over they would join the other children, but now they liked best to
be in the quiet semidarkness where Naomi spent most of her time with
them. Naomi Myers was just as clean and cool as a nurse could be, and
had an endless inspired kindness for every child. She thought she hid
that little Henriette had won her heart of hearts, otherwise she had no
favorite.

“And perhaps she _should_ be loved best,” Whiteleaf told herself as she
stood by the child’s bed, smiling down at her, “seeing we must do most
for her and yet can never do enough.”

“Will Philip come—will Philip _surely_ come?” Henriette whispered as
Whiteleaf bent close to her.

“Yes, he will surely come,” Whiteleaf promised, but to her own surprise
she did not feel her heart leap with the child’s at the thought of
Philip’s coming.

She passed back through the house to the kitchen where she did almost
all the cooking for each child herself, waited on by a kindly ignorant
girl who could not be trusted with any but the simplest tasks. Vine
could scrub and wash and not break things any more, because she watched
Whiteleaf’s every movement and knew, after six months’ constant
companionship, that she would never be spoken to harshly or
misunderstood when out of her great good nature, disconnected from
reason, she made her worst mistakes.

By three o’clock everything was cleaned up and put away. The eight
little trays were got ready for tea, and the small world at rest. Vine
slept on the shady kitchen porch, even Naomi lay down on the veranda
while the children slept. Only Whiteleaf still moved noiselessly to and
fro, cooling and easing the feverish children, who were just beginning
to get restless with rising temperatures.

There was always something to be done in the annex and yet there was
always the look as if everything had been already done. When the next
need arose it would be met just as easily as the times in between had
been met when there was no need. The cool mountain air passed
ceaselessly through the doors and windows. Although the sea was far away
yet it was on all sides of them, and every breath drawn tasted of its
tonic wildness.

When Lucy arrived to inspect the annex the golden light had lost its
weight and spread, thin and fragile, over the mountain peaks. The colors
of flowers and trees no longer burned into one sultry flame together,
but each blossom offered up its separate fugitive loveliness. Whiteleaf
met Lucy on the porch.

“Welcome,” she said invitingly, “into your new kingdom!” Lucy smiled
too, but she felt shy and did not know quite what to do, with
Whiteleaf’s courteous surrender.

“What will you see first?” Whiteleaf asked. “The children?”

“Yes, please,” Lucy answered, and then she saw them. By each small bed
was a garden in a deep plate. Each child had made her own garden, and if
she could not move much, her plate was put on the bed table across the
bed in front of her. Every day Whiteleaf would bring the children fresh
treasures for their gardens—clean colored stones, peeled willow twigs,
flowers or mosses. Friendly girls from the school would hunt the woods
for fresh stores. Besides her garden, each child had a book to read,
colored chalks and paper to draw on, and her own pencil within reach.

“But they have everything,” Lucy cried when her inspection was over.
“It’s like a paradise!”

“They have everything but health,” Whiteleaf said gently. “Now we will
come and see our little French child, Henriette. She is our only white
child. Her father was murdered in the East, and her mother died of
exposure in the boat they escaped in. Henriette recovered from the
exposure but suddenly this disease—poliomyelitis—struck her. We did
not think we could save her, but we have saved her. Generally she is
with the other children on the veranda, but on Saturday afternoons she
likes best to be in her own room so that Dr. Calgary can talk to her by
herself, and if she has to be hurt she likes best to have her pain
alone, as I should also like it if I were in her place. You see, she
must have pain in order to win back any power of movement and we must
give it to her and see that she gives it to herself. But she trusts us.
This makes it easier for us. Henriette is so brave that if it were not
easier she would never let us know it.”

Lucy was deeply moved. “You must love these children very much!” she
said.

Whiteleaf’s keen eyes rested on Lucy’s with a flicker of amusement. “I
have never found it difficult to love a child,” she admitted. “Grownup
people perhaps may be problems, because truth has often escaped them.
But a child lives near the truth because it has not developed anything
to challenge it, even when it lives in what we call a world of
make-believe.”

Henriette lay very flat and motionless on her narrow bed. She could not
move even her head, so that Lucy had to stand at the foot of her cot
straight in front of her. Although she was so helpless, Henriette had an
expression of great precision and determination, as if she knew exactly
what she meant to do with what she could still use.

“She speaks very good English,” Whiteleaf told Lucy. “We think she had
an English nurse, but generally we speak French together because she
speaks it better than we do—so she can be amused at our mistakes.”

“How old are you, Henriette?” Lucy asked the child in French. Henriette
smiled approvingly.

“Now your French,” she said, “it has very much the right sound to
me—like Philip’s French. Philip studied at the Sorbonne—it is as if he
belonged to me—Philip! I am ten years old, but my tenth birthday, that
I can’t remember. It happened when there were so many bombs falling. My
ninth birthday I remember very well, but I think I do not want to speak
about it.”

“No, no,” Lucy said quickly, “I only wanted to know how old you are
because I wondered if you were too old for a doll. I have one with me, a
French doll, given me by someone who had bought it in Paris. She is
wonderfully dressed, this doll, a grownup lady, and her eyes open and
shut!”

“If her eyes open and shut, and if she’s French, then I should not be
too old for her,” Henriette said, the color coming into her white
cheeks. “Perhaps I am rather too old for dolls, but I have never had one
yet that opened and shut her eyes.”

“Tomorrow I shall bring her,” Lucy promised, and then she saw the
child’s eyes change and fill with light.

Lucy turned and saw standing directly behind her a tall, dark man. His
face might have been sculptured out of mahogany. It was a handsome,
arrogant face that managed to look at the same time both bitter and
kind. Lucy felt that she already knew those luminous eyes under their
thick black brows, the clean-cut Grecian line between forehead and nose
and those sensitive firm lips, which had been controlled so much that
they were slow to smile. There were hollows in the man’s temples and his
black, crisp hair was slightly flecked with silver. But he was still
young, and his body was a splendid sight, broad at the shoulders,
straight-backed and tapering to slender hips, with limbs that fitted as
neatly as a bird’s wings fit into the body of a bird.

He did not smile when Whiteleaf introduced him to Lucy, and he seemed
not to see her hand stretched out to meet his. Lucy, her own smile fixed
a little foolishly on her face, was unable to get rid of it as quickly
as she wished.

Henriette cried, “Philip!” and in a single stride he had reached her
bed, and was on his knees beside her; then he smiled. Lucy thought she
had never seen so brilliant and tender a smile, or one that held so much
gaiety. It was as if he poured the power and rhythm of his whole body
into this little stiffened frame so close to him.

“We will, if you will allow, leave them alone together,” Whiteleaf said
in a low voice to Lucy. “Perhaps Dr. Calgary will join us presently.”

While they looked over the rest of the annex Lucy was aware, a little
enviously, of outbursts of rapture, sudden cries of joy and peals of
laughter from the veranda, where Philip had found the other children,
but Whiteleaf did not suggest their joining them.

“I have never seen in my life so perfect a place for sick children,”
Lucy said with enthusiasm, when she had seen everything the annex
contained.

“I should think the only danger would be that the children would be too
happy ever to want to get well.”

“I hope we do not make them feel that,” Whiteleaf answered gravely, “but
I do not think happy children ever want to be ill. You are not ill
_because_ you are unhappy, but it is seldom if you are altogether happy
and at home in the world that you are ill.”

“It must happen sometimes,” Lucy objected.

“Oh, anything may happen sometimes,” Whiteleaf agreed with a little
laugh and a shrug of her slender shoulders. “It is a very various
universe, Mrs. Armstrong. Have the scientists not discovered for us
lately that the stars do not keep strictly to their courses? So the
English poet is wrong, though poets are very seldom wrong, who wrote of
them so beautifully, looking up into the sky at night, ‘The army of
unalterable Law!’”




                             _CHAPTER VIII_


Elvira sat on her balcony, screened by orange trumpet flowers, polishing
her brilliant crimson nails.

Lucy had just left the annex, where she had paid her first visit. It was
longer than Elvira could have wished, but Philip Calgary had not
lingered. Elvira had watched him ride up, and he had ridden off even
earlier than usual.

The elder girls on the terrace beneath avoided having to greet Lucy by a
concerted evasive action. They were in her direct path, but they melted
away before she reached them, only to come together again on the same
spot after she had passed, leaving Lucy to feel uncomfortable without
quite knowing why.

They meant to be nasty, and Elvira had taught them how. Unfortunately
the younger girls had already forgotten to be nasty. That was the
trouble, Elvira thought, with girls under twelve—they had no venom.
They all ran now to greet Lucy and wavered about her like minnows in a
stream. Elvira, who was susceptible to beauty, admitted to herself that
it was a pretty sight to see the slim, pink and white Lucy surrounded by
these dark children with their resilience and their lovely skins which
had the bloom of purple grapes. Lucy, unfortunately, was Elvira’s enemy.
She was white, young, and in Elvira’s shoes, otherwise Elvira would have
wished that Lucy could really be her friend.

Elvira always lied first to herself before she lied to anybody else,
since this gave her a conviction of moral honesty. Surely if you tell
the same thing to others that you tell to yourself, you must be
approaching truth? She told herself now that she liked Lucy. She liked
her for not having seen that Elvira was colored, and for not having
altered her manner to her after she knew it. Nevertheless, Elvira meant
to get rid of Lucy. “The best thing, quite apart from my feeling quite
fond of her,” Elvira told herself, “is to keep in with her. She might
marry young Anstruther, who keeps telephoning her, and if she does she
would back my chances. I’m afraid my dear little bodyguard hates her too
much. I must do something about it, and yet I mustn’t do too much. Girls
are so piecemeal.”

She sighed reflectively. She couldn’t afford a blunder now. Fortunately
she was no longer young, raw, or at the mercy of her immediate
sensations. Besides, Elvira knew that she could depend on the
intractable loyalty of adolescents. She had great power over the older
girls, and over their leader, the head girl of the school, Elvira’s
power was absolute.

Elvira was not vicious. She played on the awakening senses of young
girls without any danger of losing control over her own. Girls had to
wake up physically sooner or later, why should they not wake up to her?
She made them aware of her as they had never been aware of anyone
before. Her look, the curve of her crimson lips, the light touch of her
narrow hands, electrified them. The cleverness of her carefully chosen
clothes, the keen, sweet scent of flowers about her person, impressed
them as tremendous human achievements. A smile from Elvira lightened the
dullest work, the mere sound of her voice in another room roused their
blood to run faster. She possessed their unpierced illusions, and all
their vague unbalanced generous worship was at her disposal.

Elvira made good scholars out of her devotees. Like the poet Browning,
where their hearts lay, they let their brains lie also. But sometimes
they exaggerated. Sometimes they carried out her hints too forcibly.
Margorie Fielding, for instance—she had been altogether too earnest in
her hatred of Elvira’s supplanter. Margorie was Elvira’s star turn, her
triumph, but, Elvira thought with a regretful sigh, Margorie was also
the only real menace to her security. Like many English people, this
white child was too thorough. It was not enough for her to have
emotions, she wanted to carry them out to their logical conclusions.
Margorie was a tightrope walker. High above the crowds she kept her
precarious balance, while all the time the ground under her feet would
have done just as well, without involving risk to herself or others.
Elvira sighed again; it was not going to be easy to divert this
single-tracked adventurer on her high and fragile rope. It made Elvira
dizzy even to think of her.

Elvira finished polishing her last nail. Although she was thirty-six her
hands were young, slender, velvety, and beautifully kept. They looked
quite useless, but this was a mistake. They were highly efficient hands
with great muscular power. A knock, low but determined, sounded at the
door. Margorie Fielding came in, her back straight as a walking stick,
her head erect, her eyes attempting to hide the sparkling adoration that
sprang to them when they met Elvira’s, but she couldn’t hide it. The
light flickered like a danger signal. All Margorie’s fifteen years of
suppressed emotions, innocent and wild, were bottled up behind her
precarious self-control. She did not see a made-up woman on the downward
slopes of thirty in an overdecorated room. She entered Paradise to meet
an angel.

The love of power over another human being is fixed to a track, you
cannot move off it without an accident, even when the signals are set
against you, and Elvira’s smile of welcome was not as innocuous as she
would have liked to make it.

“Sit down, darling,” she said gently, “on the divan by the balcony.
Forgive me if I walk about a little. If I sat down too I might not be
able to cure what is the matter with me—I want to forget it. I want to
walk it off. I don’t want even to give a name to it. Perhaps if I did I
should call it jealousy.”

“But why should you not be jealous?” Margorie said vehemently. “If you
can call it that—you have a right, you have every right to feel
insulted and put upon. I burn with rage whenever I think of that silly
girl set over you, in your place.”

“Yes, but she has not put herself there,” Elvira reminded Margorie. “I
have been with her all day—don’t think she hasn’t been kind and nice to
me. She’s been exceedingly tactful and anxious to save my feelings—if
only I could get used to taking favors, instead of granting them.”

“Don’t talk like that,” Margorie said in a low, intense voice. “You make
me feel so furious that I’m frightened. You can’t think how I hate her.
You will always be the only authority in the world for me.”

“But we shouldn’t hate her,” Elvira said, turning at the end of the room
and fixing Margorie with her dark, mournful eyes. “It’s not her fault
she’s here, and it’s her merit that she’s nice. It’s only that you’re my
friend and I can’t easily hide from you that I’m a silly old woman who
wanted to go on at least _feeling_ that she was the headmistress of
Everslade, but I can’t be, and that’s what I sent for you for, to tell
you, Margorie dear, we just mustn’t mind.

“This is what is called a ‘fait accompli,’ a thing you can’t change and
must accept graciously. Let us be thankful it is no worse. We might have
had a tyrant to depose, not a very pleasant young woman to get used to.”

Elvira sank down on the divan by Margorie’s side. She could feel the
dangerous thrill that passed through the girl’s body, as if a skilled
hand had swept across the strings of a harp, forcing their silence into
music.

Margorie said nothing. She could not change the hate once roused in her
for Lucy which consumed her like a flame. It was, indeed, part of the
consuming flame of the love that she felt for Elvira. It was
unfortunate, Elvira thought, that those who could be trusted to do most
for you were those whose company could take most out of you. Talking to
this honest, silent child was like hanging by your hands from a tree.
The full weight of your body was in your own keeping, but sooner or
later you had to drop.

“My dear, foolish child,” Elvira murmured. “If I had to give _you_ up to
her, I think I might find it harder than I could bear!”

“You need never be afraid of that!” Margorie whispered fiercely. “I’d
kill her rather than make friends with her!”

“So you think now,” Elvira said softly, “but for how long? She’s only
just come.”

“Forever,” Margorie said between clenched teeth. The force of her whole
being was behind the word she tried to keep back. She did not move—she
only trembled a little more when Elvira lightly touched her hand.

“Yes, but we must act differently, _think_ differently now,” Elvira told
her. “Don’t let them go too far, the older girls, don’t let them show
too much resentment—Angela and Petronella, for instance, don’t let
Petronella break rules and defy orders. A loyalty doesn’t disappear
because it is hidden; it can grow deeper underground. I want you to
realize that I may have to act rather differently to what I had
expected, but I shan’t change fundamentally, nor need you. When we first
talked of this together I meant to drive her out; now I am not so sure.
By her own free will she may leave us—she may marry. We have to play a
different kind of game, a waiting game. For this we need an even deeper
confidence in each other, Margorie, a confidence that goes deeper than
mere words.”

“I don’t need to learn that,” Margorie said after a long, tense silence.
“I know that nothing could ever alter what I feel for you—not even your
liking Petronella better than you like me.”

“Petronella,” Elvira said scornfully, “is a capricious, naughty,
difficult child! She accepts my care because it suits her, but she
certainly doesn’t care for me more than it pays her to. I know that as
well as you do. But my blood is in her, she’s my sister’s child. My
sister has other children, and is not well off, and that is why I made
myself responsible for Petronella and her education.

“I am going to ask you even more than usual, my dear child—I want you
for my sake to do for Petronella what I can’t do. I don’t disguise from
you that I am anxious about her. She sleeps in your room—watch over
her, report to me anything that is against the rules. She is just the
age for scrapes and I want to keep her out of them. I have been far too
lenient with her as it is, because she can’t be managed in any other
way. You have to spoil a child already spoiled or else lose her love. I
don’t want to make an enemy of Petronella, but she is beyond my control.
She might easily get herself into a pickle, when I could no longer save
her from the consequences! This new Head looks gentle and kind enough,
but she has had a very responsible position in the Services and I don’t
think she’d be willing to overlook any serious offense. English people
are apt to take what they call ‘justice’ in a rigid manner.”

Margorie lifted her eyes to Elvira. “You have to be fair,” she said
reluctantly. Elvira laughed half tenderly and half derisively.

“Oh! Yes! Yes!” she said. “You have to be fair, and I myself am in such
a ‘fair’ position now, am I not? All that I have done for the school
relentlessly thrust aside—all that I have the capacity to do for it
still—ignored. This girl set over me and the choice given me between
humiliation and my daily bread! Margorie, we see what we look at. When I
think of my niece Petronella I look at a girl I want to save, not at the
ten commandments, which after all perhaps I have not too slavishly kept
myself.”

Margorie said passionately, “I’ll help you all I can. I’ll do _anything_
for Petronella, and I’ll tell you everything that goes on. Even if it
seems like sneaking. I’ll tell you.”

Pity in the heart of a girl who is still a child for the grief of an
older woman is perhaps the keenest and purest of human emotions. It is a
bush that burns forever without consuming itself.

Elvira was satisfied with her half hour’s work. She kissed Margorie, and
with her hands on her shoulders gently pushed her toward the door.




                              _CHAPTER IX_


By the end of a month the school was like a home to Lucy and the
children had come out from behind their masks and were her friends; only
the original group of older girls showed no break in their polite
hostility. Margorie Fielding was perhaps a shade less aggressive, she
had turned the edge of her insolence away from Lucy; but when her eyes
met Lucy’s they still regarded her with blank unresponsiveness.

The senior classroom, in which most of Lucy’s teaching took place, was
at the back of the house and must have been the government house dining
room. It was a solid, spacious, wood-paneled room with long French
windows opening on to a great round peak, the highest on the Island.

Long ago, instead of rows of desks with dark girls bending over them
there had been a great mahogany table, sparkling with silver and glass,
surrounded by favored and important guests. In those days the Islanders
were really subjects and their governor a symbolic king.

It seemed strange to Lucy, whose uncle might very well have sat at the
head of the polished table, that she had been chosen to teach the girls
who were to take the place of those important ghosts, so that they would
not need a king any more. What was she herself, she wondered, a ghost of
the past, or a ghost of the future? Did she belong to Bob and the
planters, with whom she spent her Sunday holiday once a fortnight, or
did she really belong far more to these hard-working children who were
to take upon their shoulders responsibility slowly being wrenched from
her compatriots? Perhaps the antagonism of the older girls was an
unconscious repudiation of her authority, perhaps they felt insecure
with her, as if she promised them what it was not in her power to give
them.

It was a hot noon hour, and Lucy felt uncomfortably unsure of herself
and of her subject. They were preparing an essay on Shelley, who was her
favorite poet, so she should not have felt this sense of insecurity.
Suddenly she was aware of a ripple of excitement spreading across the
room. The girls were quicker of hearing than she was. A far-off
clip-clop of horse’s hoofs had reached them. Their eyes darted alive
with suspense toward the French windows. Lucy’s eyes followed them.
Philip Calgary came riding down the bridle path toward the annex.

How easily horse and rider moved, as if life poured through them in a
secret rhythm! Golden and brown the sun caught them up and played with
them till they were part of the same brilliant pattern.

The purple trumpet flowers which half screened the windows framed them,
for one brilliant, burning instant, while horse and rider shone
together, chiseled against the golden air, with an intense significance.

“That was a man,” the girls’ eyes said, “a real man who rode past our
window!” More than a thought, a quickening of their whole being invaded
them. They turned their eyes on Lucy challengingly, as if they were
demanding what this man’s image meant to her—this man who was one of
themselves. Did she too recognize his male significance or—because he
was dark—was he merely a shadow from the underworld?

Lucy felt her heart beating in her throat. She did not move. She tried
to hide, even from herself, that when the window emptied and the purple
trumpets framed nothing but golden air she had felt life withdrawn as
they had. She did not want to acknowledge that Philip Calgary could stir
the quick tides of her blood. Myra O’San’s voice steadied her by a
sudden question.

“I have chosen ‘Arethusa’ for my subject,” Myra said, “but please, I do
not quite know what this means:

                 “‘In the rocking deep
                 Beneath the Ortygian shore,
                 Like spirits that lie
                 In the azure sky
                 When they love but live no more.’

“If you do not live, can you love? And if you love, can you possibly be
dead?”

There was a long silence while Lucy pulled herself together and thought
what Shelley meant. The hummingbirds gyrating madly at the open lips of
the trumpet flowers made the only sound the stunned earth had to offer.
The girls had subsided, vitality sank away from them, they were prepared
for “Arethusa” now, but something had happened to Lucy’s cool, steady
voice. When it took up Myra O’San’s question, it was as if new life were
in it, stronger and more persuasive; it was almost as if she herself had
become Arethusa.

“We have to feel what Shelley felt,” Lucy said, “before we know what he
thought, because I think Shelley himself felt first, before his words
came. Arethusa is an image too small for the dawn spreading out into the
world and losing itself in light. But through Arethusa—just because she
was a girl—Shelley could pour his full emotion for the dawn.

                  “‘She leapt down from the rocks
                  With her rainbow locks
                  Streaming among the streams;
                  Her steps paved with green
                  The downward ravine
                  Which slopes to the Western gleams,
                  And gliding and springing
                  She went ever singing
                  In murmurs as soft as sleep,
                  The Earth seemed to love her
                  And Heaven smiled above her,
                  As she lingered towards the deep.’

“You can see the swift hurrying of light from rock to rock, as if a girl
were leaping with the wind in her hair. Emotion in Shelley moves and
lives through symbols, and yet nothing is ever big enough to hold what
Shelley feels. He is perhaps the most universal of all our poets. Life
itself is hardly enough for him; he has to break it up so as to give his
whole spirit to the baseless, endless air.” Lucy’s voice failed her. The
girls were all staring at her again. Only Myra listened beyond her words
to reach Lucy’s heart.

“Yes, now I see,” Myra said tranquilly. “So when Shelley said in that
other poem ‘Epipsychidion,’ ‘I met her robed in such exceeding glory
that I beheld her not,’ what he really meant was that he had seen
everything _through_ her—because she was so beautiful.”

“Yes,” said Lucy, with her eyes on the empty bridle path. “Yes, I think
he meant just that.”

“And when he said, what Myra asked you,” Margorie Fielding maliciously
interposed, “that they loved when they weren’t alive, what did he mean
then?”

Lucy looked at her. “If they loved as Shelley meant they did, wholly,
universally,” she answered, “I think he thought that was all the life
they needed.”

“After all, they were only spirits,” Petronella said in a bored voice,
“and so as they were dead, they couldn’t love any more than that,
anyway!”

Lucy did not contradict her. Myra O’San returned to her essay writing,
and Lucy thought that of all the girls in the school the one she liked
least was Petronella.




                              _CHAPTER X_


Lucy sat on her balcony alone in the moonlight. The sky was pierced by
enormous stars; unveiled and cloudless, she seemed to gaze into the
heart of darkness.

Not a breath of wind stirred. The outlines of shadowy trees hung with
blossoms were mere ghosts of color, motionless in the still air, as if
carved out of nothing.

From time to time a nightjar trilled its long, whining note from branch
to branch. “Chuck-willy’s-wife!” it called with incredible urgency. A
group of coconut trees, their slender trunks like silver candlesticks,
dipped their feathered headdresses into a bowl of darkness.

The Island itself drew closer to Lucy. She longed to slip back into the
fathomless stream of time, to when the golden Arawaks, the Island’s
first and freest children, danced unconcerned by civilization under the
same brilliant, hollow moon. The golden Arawaks had not known war. They
had not caught happy bridegrooms away from their brides in their first
youth. They seemed no further away from Lucy, as she gazed into the
empty moonlight, than her dead lovers. The human heart, she told herself
bitterly, controls nothing, not chance, beauty, cruelty, or the uneven
pace of time.

Beneath the peaks above her, piercing the darkness with their silver
spurs, bestial pirates had picnicked in unchartered coves. Under the
same deep night sky embittered slaves had wept their hearts out. Lucy
shivered as she thought of their hungry, uncared-for survivors.

The mountains had changed neither shape nor color. The Island looked as
beautiful and richly dowered, as if no human footstep had touched its
shore, yet a few miles below where Lucy sat a town of inhumanly crowded,
sordid shacks lay between a prison and a swamp. The main road from this
town to the seaport city which ruled the Island was like a trodden
cattle ranch. No grass grew there, only a few starved trees, and yet the
bare, burned earth was the breeding ground of thousands of human beings.
Men without homes, women without husbands, children without parents.

Horizonless and hungry people edged the busy roadside, mocked by cars
full of overfed, gaily dressed men and women dashing recklessly past
them, covering these ruined scarecrows, who were as human as themselves,
with dust and despair.

“I haven’t come here just to drive down that road and back again to this
survival of enchantment,” Lucy told herself, and yet what could she do
about it—sit back and look on? Marry Bob Anstruther and feel herself
swept back into the old hierarchy of ruled and ruling? She seemed to see
Bob’s home, the great white house she had already visited, poised on the
well-kept hillside like an owl with its wings extended, dropping toward
its prey. Bob Anstruther’s home was a beautiful house, the Anstruthers
were good employers. They had a sugar estate, a farm, a house full of
laughing servants.

Was this all the strange Island of her dreams had to offer her?

Suddenly she heard a sharp knock at the door. She thought it was Elvira,
to whom she called, “Come in,” but in a moment Margorie Fielding,
reluctant and defiant, stood beside her.

“I know it’s late!” she said defensively. “It’s past ten o’clock.”

“But I’m glad you’ve come,” Lucy said welcomingly. “Won’t you sit down?
I was finding myself very poor company. The night is so beautiful I
wanted to share it. Let’s forget the time.”

Margorie stood leaning against the balcony rail. She cast a brief,
disparaging glance over the terrace. “I don’t think tropical places are
beautiful,” she said grudgingly. “Same old moon. Same old rickety palms.
Sharks in the sea, alligators in the rivers, and if there aren’t snakes
in the forest it’s only because the mongooses eat them. I’ve always
wanted to live at home, and I can’t think why you ever came out. My
father’s a brigadier and was sent, so he can’t help it. Anyhow, I’ve
come to report to you. Angela and Petronella can’t be found. I’ve looked
everywhere for them, even at the annex. No one has seen them or knows
where they are.”

“Miss Loring is on duty tonight,” Lucy said consideringly. “Haven’t you
asked her what to do?”

“Naturally I should have asked her if I could have found her,” Margorie
said with a touch of insolence in her voice. “Perhaps she thought as you
were in, she needn’t stay in herself.”

“That would be odd,” said Lucy, “since she is on duty. But you were
quite right, if you couldn’t find her, to come to me. It is quite
possible she sent a message to me which has miscarried. You know more
about these girls than I do. Where would Petronella and Angela want to
go at this time of night?”

“I don’t see why I should tell you that,” Margorie said fiercely. “After
all, they’re my friends. It’s my duty to report their absence but I
don’t see why I need tell you what isn’t certain and might make worse
trouble for them. Find out for yourself where they are.”

“I think you came to me,” Lucy reminded her, “because you were anxious
about them. I can’t help them, can I, if you won’t tell me what their
danger is?”

Margorie’s eyes searched Lucy’s with aggressive intensity. She was
angry, but under her anger lay fear, and it was her anger that at last
surrendered to Lucy’s unruffled silence.

“I can’t be certain where they’ve gone,” Margorie said at last. “If it
isn’t where I’m afraid it is—if Miss Loring took them with her—then
they’ll be all right, and I was a fool to have come to you.”

She shivered as if the consequences of her folly might be more
frightening than what had happened to her friends.

“No, that isn’t possible,” Lucy told her firmly. “Miss Loring might have
gone out, perhaps leaving a message for me that I haven’t got, but she
would never take the girls out without referring to me. I quite
understand what you feel about getting them into trouble, but I am
afraid they are _in_ trouble already, and whatever you can tell me may
help to get them out of it.”

“You don’t know about the roadhouse, then?” Margorie said abruptly.
“It’s six miles away and three bicycles have gone. Of course it’s
absolutely forbidden, but it isn’t the first time it’s happened. Rum
makes Angela as sick as a cat. She simply crashes after it. But they
both love dancing, and I suppose because they’re both colored they don’t
mind dancing with those black men. But they’re a rough lot, and when
they get excited anything might happen. Petronella’s Miss Loring’s
niece. I can’t _let_ anything happen to her.”

“I’ll go and bring them back at once,” Lucy said reassuringly. “Can I
get there by my small car—I suppose if it’s a roadhouse they must be
near a road?”

“Well, actually it’s in the forest,” Margorie explained. “The girls
would go by the bridle path, which is shorter. But you can get there by
car, too. There is a path leading from the gorge above the waterfall.
I’ll come with you, of course, and show you the way. I ought to tell
you—if you don’t know—that it’s a bit risky for white people to butt
in on these dances.”

“No, no!” a shrill voice called from beneath the balcony. “You must not
go, Mrs. Armstrong! It is not wise. Those girls will come back. To go
after them isn’t safe. How do you know this isn’t a trick done to harm
you? This one here, she is one of them!”

“Well, I do know,” Lucy said with quiet conviction. “Why should anyone
wish to harm me? Margorie came to help her friends. But where do you
spring from, Myra, this time of night? Have you been listening to what
we were talking about?”

“I heard only what she told you at the end,” Myra explained
breathlessly. “If I had been able to come earlier I would have listened
from the beginning. But we too have had excitement tonight: Henriette
has moved—she has moved _herself_. She turned her head and her arm
moved! We called up Philip and he is with her now. Mrs. Armstrong, if
you must go after these girls will you not let Philip go with you? As
for listening, why should I _not_ listen? I come every night under your
balcony to find if you are safe.”

“Safe,” Lucy exclaimed, “why on earth shouldn’t I be safe? But perhaps
it would be wiser to ask Dr. Calgary if he can come with me. I will wait
here till you get back.” The distorted disk of Myra’s face slid into the
darkness before Lucy had finished speaking.

“Why did you do that?” Margorie demanded. “Don’t you know that the
people over there are our enemies?”

“You are talking nonsense,” Lucy said firmly. “The annex and the school
are part of one thing. They must naturally help each other in an
emergency. If what you say is true, and going after the girls is
dangerous, I am certainly not going to let you run into the danger I am
trying to get them out of. I know something about danger—you’re a fool
if you don’t take any help you can get. Dr. Calgary will be a help. He
knows these people, and I don’t.”

“He’s a Negro and you aren’t!” Margorie said contemptuously. “Besides,
he’s worse than just colored—he’s not a friend. Perhaps you don’t know
what he’s like, but I do. You made me think I could trust you and now
you’ve betrayed me—I’ll never forgive you!”

Lucy made no attempt to stop or follow Margorie as she rushed from the
balcony. Instead, she sat for a few minutes thinking over what this
outbreak meant. She herself had no wish for Philip Calgary’s help; what
she had heard of him from Elvira made her think of him as a faithless
and probably vulgar Don Juan, and somehow it had made his offenses a
little ranker that he had taken no notice whatever of Lucy. Prepared to
snub his probable advances, Lucy had returned from the few interviews
she had had with Philip asking herself whether she hadn’t received
instead of given the frosty inhibitions implicit in their short
conversations. However, Philip was a man and no other man was available,
and Lucy had the sense to see that this was an emergency which needed a
man’s help. By the time she had reached and unlocked the hall door she
found Whiteleaf’s neat, erect figure awaiting her under the shadow of
Philip’s tall one. Neither of them looked as if they had hurried, yet
they were there as soon as Lucy had opened the door.

“Myra has told us,” Whiteleaf said with calm incisiveness, “and Dr.
Calgary will go with you to bring back the girls. These things can be
dangerous at night to white people. If you will permit me, as Miss
Loring is out, I will stay here till you return. Naomi will sit up with
little Henriette, who is too excited to sleep.”

“Thank you both very much for coming,” Lucy said quickly. “I’m so glad
about Henriette. I think all the girls here are asleep except
Margorie—she’s very unhappy at having to report her friends. Miss Peck
and Miss Myers are on leave, but if you want Miss Lestrange she is
probably still reading in her room.”

“Thank you, I shall want no one,” Whiteleaf replied. She went quickly
into the house without looking at either Lucy or Philip before she shut
the big door noiselessly behind her.

Lucy turned a little uncertainly away from the swiftly closed door. She
was upset by the night’s adventure. She was shaken by Elvira’s having
forsaken her charge, desperately frightened at what might happen to
Petronella and Angela, and curiously baffled and distressed by her
failure to keep—since for a moment she had possessed it—Margorie
Fielding’s confidence. She wanted help, if she couldn’t find it anywhere
else, even from Philip. But his silence was not of the kind that
promised help. He was going with Lucy because he had to, not because he
wished to. His silence, as they walked across the garden to his car, was
without invitation.

“There’s nothing on the road at night,” he told her when they had
reached it, “so we can drive fast. I hope you don’t mind bumps.”

They plunged into the silvery darkness before Lucy found breath to
answer him.

“I too want to get there fast,” she told him, a little stiffly. “What is
this roadhouse they have gone to like?”

“Like any other roadhouse,” Philip replied in a tone of courteous
belligerency. “It’s a place where people—scattered people from lonely
holdings all over the mountainside—meet to drink and dance. We usually
call them rum houses, since rum is our cheapest drink. They will, of
course, be black people, and since they are half starved and their lives
without amenities, they may be rather rough and primitive. It is not a
place for schoolgirls. Otherwise it serves its purpose. When you have no
money, your pleasures have to be cheap.”

“I see,” murmured Lucy a little forlornly. Above their heads a stream of
stars dived from darkness to darkness. Nothing else was visible but the
flung-back slices of the road. Lucy was constantly jerked against
Philip’s taut shoulder, and she was quite aware that he wished to avoid
their enforced contact as much as she did.

“I think we shall get there before the men have time to get drunk,” he
said at last, in a more friendly tone. “I took the liberty of asking
Myra O’San to call up Dr. MacTaggert to join us. His mission is nearer
their shack than we are, so he ought to get there soon after us.”

“Of course I don’t mind. I’ve never met Dr. MacTaggert,” Lucy said, “but
I’ve heard a lot of things about him. He must be terribly nice. Only why
did you think we ought to have him with us?”

“He has a great influence over our people,” Philip told her after a
short silence. “Besides, it’s better for you that he should be with us.
If the girls make any difficulty, and I’m told they’re difficult girls,
you would have to appear to act as an authority—and I’d rather that you
kept out of it. You needn’t be seen at all with me if you’ll just wait
till he comes up. I’ll go in first alone and try to talk the men into a
good humor till he comes. I know some of them. And then you can come in
with MacTaggert.”

“I should have thought it would be all right if we went in together,”
Lucy objected. “After all, I am their headmistress. It’s not that I mind
our having Dr. MacTaggert, only it seems silly, and the committee rather
insisted that if I wanted any help, I should always apply to Mr.
Anderson who is our padre and takes our services.”

“He belongs to the Church of England and cuts no ice with our people,”
Philip explained, “besides living miles away without a car. Believe me,
we’d much better have MacTaggert—he’s white and a Christian, that’s all
I want him for. If I were forced to take these girls away against their
will we could easily have trouble with the men. I don’t say I couldn’t
get them out, but I should act as a sort of challenge while MacTaggert
would have natural authority over them.”

“I don’t see why,” insisted Lucy. “The girls might not obey your orders,
but they would certainly obey mine. I don’t see what sort of a challenge
you mean. I don’t want to be protected at anyone else’s expense.”

“I think you forget,” Philip told her, with an edge to his voice, “what
you frequently make me point out. I am an African and you are white. Why
should I be with you? Why should these girls come away at my bidding?
These are the questions this crowd would certainly ask and I do not
think I could provide them with suitable answers. MacTaggert could.”

“I am their headmistress,” Lucy said sharply. “I have a right to take my
girls away and you have a right to help me if it should be necessary.”

Philip laughed. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but right is such a funny word
when used by English people. They seem to think it belongs only to them.
These men have quite a different interpretation. They will feel that
they have a ‘right’ to dance with any girls who come to the roadhouse
for that purpose, and they’ll even perhaps think the girls have a right
to come. If I were to act without MacTaggert I’d certainly get your
girls away but I might cause a riot doing it, and if they unfortunately
saw you as well, they’d think I was trying to get away with more than my
share of the evening’s entertainment.”

“How disgusting,” Lucy exclaimed.

“I was sure you would think that,” Philip replied with icy politeness,
“and so you see, I took my precautions against it.”

Lucy had an uncomfortable feeling that she had expressed herself badly
and even offensively to a man who was trying to help her.

She broke the long silence between them abruptly.

“Of course I don’t understand the life on this island yet,” she said. “I
know I’m very ignorant and may make silly blunders—that’s why I do
think I ought to have been warned about the roadhouse and told that the
girls had gone there before.”

“If Miss Loring did not tell you, I imagine that no one else would have
liked to mention it,” Philip answered briefly.

“You blame Miss Loring,” Lucy said, with the annoyance that had escaped
from her voice back in it again. “But surely Miss Ho Sung is just as
responsible.”

“I hardly think so,” Philip replied. “None of the annex girls have ever
been to this place. Keeping order in the school is Miss Loring’s
business, not Miss Ho Sung’s. As far as I am concerned I accept no
responsibility whatever for what goes on in the school or the annex—my
business is to attend to the sick when I am sent for, nothing else. I
dislike schoolgirls as patients in a collective sense. I had to
undertake Everslade because of the great distance and lack of transport
on the Island. Also Miss Ho Sung is the only person here who is
qualified to give the Kenny treatment for poliomyelitis. I have only
looked after the school since my war services terminated, and the annex
agreed to take my poor little shipwrecked war patient over for me. I may
resign when these patients are all cured. I am considering it under the
altered situation.”

Lucy was silent. She had not felt that because she was white she had a
right to snub a Negro, yet she could not keep feeling that since Philip
Calgary was a Negro, he had no right to snub her. But Lucy had a logical
mind and her sense of justice as well as her reason was shocked by this
break in her own behavior. She knew that Philip Calgary had had a right
to be offended, and that she had had no right to offend him.

At last she said in a contrite voice, “I’m very sorry. I had no business
to be so rude—I expect I’m just frightened and upset about the girls
and have lost my head. There are a lot of things about the school which
I wish I knew and I don’t know how to find them out!”

“That’s natural,” Philip said, less dryly. “Your duties are new to you
and so is our island. We have our complications and no doubt we rather
take it for granted that newcomers understand what they can’t possibly
know anything about till events have brought it home to them. Now this
is where we leave the car and take to the forest. It will be dark under
the trees, but I brought a torch, and there are no snakes or wild
animals.”

Philip, when he was not controlling his voice, had an extremely pleasant
one, cadenced and musical, and behind his voice there was a source of
hidden laughter. He was a man who had suffered intensely and worked to
the limits of his tremendous physical powers, but he had always retained
a sense of amusement in living. He had even found some of his own
sufferings not without humor. He thought the girl beside him both
attractive and entertaining, and although he meant to have nothing to do
with her, he intended, while carrying out his Spartan decision, to save
her from inconvenience or danger, if he had the chance.

The trees were filled with silence, no leaf stirred. The scarlet walls
of the Flames-of-the-Forest above their heads were closed, as if a
restraining finger had been laid on their petals. Through sudden gaps in
the trees moonbeams latticed a silver leaf pattern under their feet.

“Nothing seems to be alive here any more,” Lucy whispered, but even as
she spoke a sound reached them. A harsh jangle of notes without music
violated the night, robbing the moonlight of its frozen beauty.

“Perhaps you had better stop here under this Pimento,” Philip told her.
“MacTaggert will come by this path, you can’t miss him. I’ll go on ahead
and try to talk the men into a good temper and then you and MacTaggert
can come on together and read the riot act over your girls. We’ll get
them away as quickly as possible. He’ll make a splendid chaperon for all
three of you and prevent talk. Is that perfectly clear?”

“Of course,” Lucy said, “but please don’t think that I wouldn’t go in
with you anyhow—if there _wasn’t_ Dr. MacTaggert!”

“But fortunately, there _is_!” Philip told her dryly.

A finger of light caught Philip’s tall figure as he approached the
shack. The door opened suddenly and Lucy saw a room full of wildly
capering shadows. The fierce clatter of the phonograph possessed their
eager bodies. Girls and men swayed and scampered to and fro, as if
scourged by an invisible fury. Sometimes a man, seized by the frenzy of
desire, caught hold of a girl, half entranced, half struggling, and
dragged her out with him into the moonlight. The glade in which the
shack stood surged and shook with sound. The syncopated dance music
broke provocatively into half and quarter tones as if to force forward
the dancers’ leaping blood. No one noticed Philip wading from the
shelter of the trees through the moon-washed grasses. The dancers spun
on, whipped like tops by the urgent jazz, till Philip’s tall figure
blocked the doorway; then the music stopped with a sudden jerk. Philip’s
voice, resonant and powerful, reached Lucy, though the words escaped
her. He seemed to be cajoling and joking the men into good humor. There
were answering protests, angry questions shot through the listening air,
but one by one the protests changed to laughter, till a high shrill
treble broke through the men’s deep voices.

“But I don’t want to go! I _will_ stay and dance!” Lucy recognized
Petronella’s willful voice. “You can’t make me come! You’re only a
doctor!” Lucy walked toward the shack. This was her business more than
Philip’s. Whatever the men thought, whatever discomfort might follow,
she was determined to take her share of it. Quick footsteps came up
behind her, and a restraining hand was laid on her shoulder. “Are you
not Mrs. Armstrong?” a deep voice asked her. From some tremendous
height, the kindest and most piercing blue eyes she had ever seen smiled
down into Lucy’s.

“I am MacTaggert,” the voice said. Shouts came from the open doorway. A
crowd of men like angry bees threw themselves on Philip.

Dr. MacTaggert’s voice rang out above the commotion and separated the
struggling figures as if by force; yet he had used no force. One by one
the men stepped back and Dr. MacTaggert smiled down on them from his
great height. His hand rested on Lucy’s shoulder, as if he wanted to
introduce them to a new friend. The roughly carved faces of the men
slowly took on some of the dignity of his. They all knew how the
persuasion of a lifetime full of love and courage had been passed among
them.

No one had ever come to Dr. MacTaggert for help in vain. He had often
rebuked sin, but he had always respected the human being behind the
sinner. Lucy hesitated; her eyes went past the men to the terrified
faces of Petronella and Angela.

“Petronella!” she said in a clear, grave voice. “Angela!” Then she
looked at the men with a friendly smile. “They must come home!” she told
them gently. Instantly the men made way for the cowed and trembling
girls. The battle was over without having been fought.

Philip stood in the shadow of the roof as they came out. He bent his
head toward Lucy and said to her in a voice she had never heard from him
before, “That was the right way to speak to our Islanders!”




                              _CHAPTER XI_


When Lucy woke at dawn a white wall surrounded her; the balcony, the
great house, the Island itself, were lost in mist. She breathed air
muffled in sea fog. It filled her throat with its cold and heavy
substance; and her eyes tried in vain to pierce the blanched darkness.

The night with all its alarms and discords rushed back into her mind.
While she dressed she tried to think of the great good fortune Elvira’s
friendship had been to her. Everything in Everslade would have been more
strange and less successful without this warm and loyal harmony. Must
Lucy lose it now? Had she already lost it? And what was the price which
she was prepared to pay in order to retain Elvira’s friendship?

The school opened as usual. Lucy took prayers. The girls sang a hymn
with vigor and ate their breakfasts with equal heartiness. No one
appeared to notice the absence of Petronella and Angela. Margorie,
without question, took over Nancy Peck’s hour of physical training for
the school, while the whole staff assembled in Lucy’s office and took
their places around a center table.

All the teachers realized that something serious had happened. The three
who already knew what it was looked only slightly less surprised and
more depressed than those who waited for Lucy to tell them. When Lucy
had finished her story of the night’s adventure a long silence followed.
The fog had seeped into the room so that each of the teachers was but a
vague outline to the others. As no one broke the silence, Lucy said, “I
realize that the responsibility for what is to be done with the girls is
mine. If they are to be expelled I must expel them, and if we can keep
them without harming the school, I shall have to accept full
responsibility for their future conduct. But before I make my decision,
I want to have the benefit of your personal opinions as to what their
punishment should be.”

The teachers made a murmur of agreement. Lucy turned toward the shadowy
figure of Elvira, who sat on her right.

“Miss Loring,” she said, “I know this discussion must be very painful
for you personally. I wish I could have spared you, but you are my chief
colleague. Your management of the school has been so highly successful
that I cannot come to any decision touching its interests without your
help.”

“I do feel it difficult,” Elvira admitted, “yet it is kind of you to ask
for my opinion. Petronella is like my own child to me. You know perhaps
that since my sister could not afford her education, I took it upon
myself. This doubles my responsibility. She is my niece and probably
this has made her feel the change of situation in the school itself in a
very foolish way. I have tried my hardest to alter her state of mind,
but I fear I have failed. That I was not here last night when I was
actually in charge makes me feel personally involved in her disgrace. I
was unexpectedly called to see a sick friend, and the message I sent
begging to be excused was never delivered. I have already suggested to
Mrs. Armstrong that I should resign, but she has generously urged that I
should remain. I hardly know what I can say to the rest of you. Yet I do
plead for clemency for the girls. They are young, and to expel a girl on
the Island from such a well-known school as this is to ruin her moral
reputation for life.” Elvira paused, wet her dry lips, and looked at
Lucy. “I don’t think I can say any more,” she finished, not without
dignity.

Whiteleaf Ho Sung rose in her turn. “We must all sympathize deeply with
Miss Loring,” she said. “I feel that I should like very much, even
without hearing her very moving appeal, to plead for clemency for these
young girls, but I do _not_ plead for it. Had this been the first
occasion, I should have thought exactly as Miss Loring thinks now—that
these girls were culpable enough for restraint, but by no means culpable
enough for expulsion. All young creatures make mistakes from
inexperience or from curiosity. What they do once need not therefore be
judged drastically, but why should they go to the roadhouse a second
time, and why indeed, having lived for several months under the new and
quite benevolent leadership of Mrs. Armstrong, should they still—if
this was their motive—be rebellious? Loyalty to a favorite teacher is a
narrow and ignorant loyalty compared to loyalty to the school itself. I
think highest of the health of the school. I should therefore remove
these girls who do not appreciate the good of the community in which
they live.”

“Miss Myers,” Lucy said, after a pause in which Miss Lestrange coughed
as if she were trying to get rid of all she had as yet heard.

“I don’t think for a moment that either of them ought to be expelled,”
Rebecca said angrily. “I think it is most unkind and unnecessary to
suggest such a thing. I don’t believe they’ll ever run off again. Not if
they are properly handled. Petronella I know very well indeed—far
better than Miss Ho Sung can—because I live under the same roof with
her. She is high-spirited and loves adventure. She doesn’t like Mrs.
Armstrong and that’s the whole cause of this second adventure. She
_hated_ the first one. The men frightened her, and she’d never have gone
again if she hadn’t wanted to make trouble. It’s all very well to talk
about schools and communities, that isn’t what girls think of! _They_
think of the people who run them. Margorie Fielding is the real leader
of the older girls. She can be trusted not to let this happen again. I’m
sure they’ll tell no one if she stops them from talking. I agree with
Miss Loring—punish them anyhow you like, but don’t expel them! I’d
think it downright cruel to take away a girl’s chances by getting her
talked about all over the Island! I wouldn’t expel any girl unless she
was actually going to have a baby, and I had to!”

“Miss Peck,” Lucy said a little dryly, as Miss Myers flounced back into
her seat. Miss Peck was on the verge of tears, her bright round face had
lost its bloom, her eyes their brilliant snap, even her figure was
robbed of its elasticity. “I don’t know what to say,” she began
hesitatingly. “I like them both. I don’t think they’re bad girls. To
tell the truth, I don’t think young people ever are _quite_ bad, though
they may behave worse than older criminals. But it’s not for the same
reason—a lot of it’s fun. But we can’t only think of the girls
themselves, can we? We’ve got to think of the Island. What will the
Island think about this? Perhaps we can hush it up here, perhaps even
the parents needn’t know, but have you thought of what the men in the
roadhouse will say? You can’t stop them talking, can you? You see, I
belong to the Island, more than any of you do, because whatever the rest
of you are I _am_ black—I _feel_ black! and I want to be proud of being
a Negress! I want every girl in the school that’s dark like me, and most
of them are, to know we can make a standard and stick to it. It’s what
the Island hopes for and expects of us. Mrs. Armstrong, the Island will
_expect_ us to expel these girls and they’ll think the less of us and of
our school if we don’t!”

“I think Miss Peck has given us a very interesting and serious opinion,”
Lucy said slowly, “and that we must consider it very carefully. Until
she spoke of it, I had overlooked the men’s speaking about what has
happened, and the effect on the Island. Please, Miss Lestrange, will you
now give us your opinion? I have asked you last because you are our
senior mistress and what you have to say must have a special value for
us all.”

Miss Lestrange took out a clean pocket handkerchief, unfolded it, and
then restored it to her pocket unused. Her faded eyes gazed out into the
misty room with a curious intensity.

“I must say,” she began with unusual briskness, “that I am rather
surprised that no one—not even our headmistress herself—has dealt upon
what these girls have actually done. Girls’ schools upon this island
were surely all founded in order to secure moral training. If any of our
girls is not virtuous her education has been useless. Any knowledge she
has managed to acquire would be dangerous without such self-discipline.”
So far, though Miss Lestrange spoke more sharply than usual, her voice
had remained that of self-controlled and quiet culture, now, to
everyone’s astonishment, her tones became suddenly loud and even coarse.
“These girls,” she shouted, “have gone into a filthy dancing hall to get
drunk with—with men! Surely you must guess what must be the _result_ of
such misconduct. How _can_ you let them stay in the school corrupting
innocent youth for which we have made ourselves responsible? Mrs.
Armstrong, if you allow these girls—these harlots, as no doubt they
already _are_—to stay in the school—I resign!”

The gulf of time had lost its bridge. All the teachers looked startled.
The gusto of indignation in Miss Lestrange’s voice shocked them all.
Lucy flushed as if she had been struck in the face.

“We were talking about young girls,” she said incisively, “not of
hardened sinners. We must not underrate morality, but we must think more
of the girls themselves. We none of us know exactly what took place, and
since we don’t know the facts, we can at least give them the benefit of
the doubt. Nevertheless, Miss Lestrange, we do fully—all of us, I
think—recognize the danger of the roadhouse. We are very isolated up
here. It is partly the absence of cinemas, shops, and men and women to
meet and think about which makes the roadhouse such a temptation, and
therefore makes the girls, to my mind, distinctly less culpable. I thank
you all very much for your opinions. Something in what each one of you
has said has been a help to me in making a decision. I suggest that we
do not immediately expel Petronella and Angela, nor expose them to any
publicity, but ask their parents to withdraw them privately after the
Christmas holidays and place them elsewhere. Nothing need be said to the
school about what they have done. The girls must promise to keep silence
about it for their own sakes and to keep the rules very strictly till
they leave, under threat of instant and public expulsion. I think the
Island will understand that if they do not return after the holidays, we
have _not_ overlooked what has happened, nor taken too light a view of
such an exposure, while we have acted for the future welfare of the
girls themselves.”

There was a long silence after Lucy had spoken, but it had an element of
relief in it. Only Miss Lestrange entirely withdrew herself from Lucy’s
decision. She said coldly, “The violation of moral standards should come
first.”

“But,” Lucy said, rising impatiently, “I don’t believe there are any
moral standards higher than helping human beings out of their
difficulties, and I don’t think we would be helping these children out
of theirs by taking away their characters.”

“People take away their own characters,” Miss Lestrange said grimly.

“Adolescent girls haven’t _got_ characters,” Elvira said. “They’re in
the stage when they’re arriving at them. I am sure mercy is best—I
still think . . .” Her voice trailed away into silence.

“In my opinion,” Whiteleaf Ho Sung said with biting distinctness, “Mrs.
Armstrong has solved our problem justly. I should, however, like to add
that it might perhaps be wise for us all to remember that the solution
of a problem is not always the way out from danger. It is sometimes the
way into it.”

There was a startled pause before the teachers separated, yet no one
asked Whiteleaf Ho Sung to what dangers she referred.




                             _CHAPTER XII_


When Whiteleaf telephoned Lucy and asked her to come over to the annex
to see Henriette, the fog-bound day was nearly over. A wall of blackness
had replaced a wall of white.

“We are unhappy about her,” Whiteleaf explained. “Perhaps she tried too
hard to move so that her muscles have become deadlocked—perhaps she
feels too much pain. She has asked for you several times. Dr. Calgary is
still at St. George’s. I do not think he can get here tonight in this
deep fog.”

“I will come at once,” Lucy promised. She had a strange feeling when she
slipped into the freezing mist, as if she were stepping outside time as
well as outside Everslade. To what moment did she really belong? On
nights like this she had called the airships down one by one to their
safe anchorage, or she had had to send some frozen pilot and his crew
back into jeopardy, to land elsewhere or nowhere. These far-off voices
in the sky calling to her had long ago been silenced, yet she found
herself listening tonight as if she could still catch one of their
messages. Nothing stirred; her flashlight showed her only a bare hand’s
breadth of white and glistening grass. Yet she had the feeling that
there was danger near her, and that in the darkness something or someone
moved near her, step by step.

Nothing happened. She reached the annex in safety. Henriette’s small,
spotless room was full of light. The Paris doll, splendid in turquoise
blue taffeta under a golden lamé coatee, was poised within reach of
Henriette’s hand. Her garden, within its pottery walls, shone complete
as the hanging gardens of a miniature Babylon. Yet Henriette wept
bitterly. There was something terrifying in the enforced stillness of
her small rigid body under a rain of tears.

“I am so so glad—so glad you have come!” Henriette whispered.

“Then you must stop crying,” Lucy told her, “for I have never seen
anyone glad with so grave a face. Why are you crying, Henriette?”

“I don’t know,” Henriette said uncertainly. “I wanted you. I wanted
Philip. The others are good to me, but they are not good to me in
French—I am French—Maman used to say to me, ‘_J’y suis, j’y reste._’ I
can move—you know that I can move, Madame Lucy?”

“Yes,” Lucy said eagerly. “I would have come sooner to see you move but
I could not get away. It is a miracle, and you are crying after such a
miracle!”

“I cried when I moved,” Henriette explained gravely, “first because I
thought it was a dream. I have often before dreamed that I could
fly—run—move—and then woke up and found nothing in me moved. But this
morning Whiteleaf came in and told me that it was not a dream but that
was only part of why I cried. If I tell you, I don’t want you to tell
anyone else.”

“It shall be our secret,” Lucy promised. Henriette stopped crying but
her eyes watched Lucy with the penetration of one all of whose other
senses are trapped into that single one of sight.

“When I move,” she whispered, “I remember! I remember what happened in
the boat.”

“What happened is now over and can’t happen any more,” Lucy said firmly,
and saw for the thousandth time a man fall like a burning torch into the
sea.

“It happened then,” Henriette said sternly. Lucy was silent.

“There were a lot of people in the boat,” Henriette went on, her eyes
fixed earnestly on Lucy’s. “I’ve forgotten how many—all men but us. I
only remember the Captain well, because he was our friend till—till
this happened!” She drew a long pained breath before she went on. “At
night I slept in _Maman-chérie’s_ arms. It was easy then because I could
move my legs and all of me, like anyone else. If anything ugly
happened—and ugly things had to happen in that boat—_Maman-chérie_
would tell me to hide my head against her, and I did. Once two men
struck each other—it was terrible to watch their faces getting angrier
and angrier, but the Captain stopped them, and once a man cried out for
a very long time and when I looked again he wasn’t there at all, and I
said, ‘Where is the crying man?’ No one answered me. The waves, too,
were so big you would not think there was room for them in the sky, and
when they fell against the boat they hissed all over us.”

A shiver came and went across the motionless body of the child. Lucy
pulled the soft blue blanket closer. She wondered if she should try to
stop the child’s awakened memories, but before she could decide to check
them, the high, feverish voice went on. “The Captain often smiled at us!
Sometimes he said to the men, ‘See how good they are, those two—a woman
and a child!’ He gave each of us our food and a little drink in a rubber
cup. Our throats were dry so we were glad to drink it, but it was nasty,
that water in the little rubber cup. One night it was very cold and
_Maman-chérie_ held me tight, but she was cold herself so it wasn’t much
warmer to be held tight, and suddenly she stopped holding me and I fell
out of her arms onto the floor of the boat!”

“Don’t tell me any more unless you want to,” Lucy whispered, her lips
close against the child’s cheek.

“The Captain picked me up,” Henriette went on steadily. “He made me feel
warm against his chest and he kept saying, ‘Sleep. Sleep, little one.
Sleep.’ So I pretended to sleep, but I didn’t really sleep, for I was
afraid. I was _right_ to be afraid, Madame, for even while he held me
they took my _Maman-chérie_ and threw her into the sea!”

“It was a dream; perhaps it was a dream,” Lucy whispered.

“I used to say that,” Henriette answered with her grave accusing eyes
fixed upon Lucy’s. “But when I could move—then I knew that it was all
quite true—and that is why I don’t want to move any more, even if I
can. Because to move is to feel alive—and, Madame, I think it is too
cruel to be alive!”

Philip’s resonant voice broke the silence.

“If you are alive _enough_, life is not cruel—it is friendly,” he told
Henriette, kneeling beside her. “Your mother was dead. She could not
feel any more when they threw her body into the sea. If she had been
even a little alive, she would never have let you fall out of her arms.”

“No, no, that is true,” Henriette agreed. “But why _must_ she be dead?
That I find cruel.”

“I don’t know why,” Philip said bluntly. “All my life I have wanted to
prevent death, but often I cannot. I can only tell you that when our
bodies die we have no further use for them. They can go into the sea or
into the earth or into the air. It does not matter. But while you have
life in you, you must use it. Life is power, it is movement, Henriette!”

The urgent strength in Philip’s eyes took the place of Henriette’s
grief; with the quick resilience of a child toward action, she cried,
“Shall we show her now—shall we show Madame Lucy now that I can really
move?”

Their eyes met across the bed, for the first time Lucy felt that he had
accepted her as a fellow human being, at work upon a common task.

“Yes, we will show her,” he told Henriette quietly, while he drew down
the soft blankets to free her from all restrictions other than her own.

“Have you watched a chicken break out of its shell? Only one little chip
at a time, on and on, he has to tap with his own little beak, nothing
else can help him, and in the end the whole chicken has set himself
free!” Philip told her.

“Can you see, Madame,” Henriette whispered excitedly. “This way—I move
my head and then this arm! It hurts, it tingles—but I move it! It
_does_ move, Philip?”

“Certainly it moves,” Philip told her triumphantly, “it moves more than
yesterday! Soon you will be able to see on both sides of you. You will
be making the world you live in larger every time you move!”

Lucy watched the slow tortured little jerk as if she were watching day
break for the first time.

“Whiteleaf!” Philip called without looking up from the child.

It was of course natural, Lucy told herself, that he should call
Whiteleaf by her name, and equally natural that she should be
immediately at his side.

Lucy withdrew her arm from the bed and Whiteleaf slipped into her place.
Henriette, ignoring the new pains that pricked and stung all over her
unused muscles, strove to meet Philip’s hands and voice in one consuming
effort. Now at last, quite visibly, her little body moved. No one
noticed when Lucy got up and slipped out into the fog.




                             _CHAPTER XIII_


Blotted out by fog, his car hidden in a siding off the main road, Philip
Calgary listened intently until he heard the light footfalls he was
expecting. “You are there, Philip?” Whiteleaf whispered.

The fatigue and tension of his exhausted mind and body sank into ease,
the deep lines on his face smoothed themselves out into the face of a
much younger man. He opened his arms to clasp her slender unseen body.
The kiss that bound them together had lost the wonder of first love, but
its significance had grown deeper.

“You are trembling,” Philip whispered. “Were you frightened coming out
alone in this fog?”

“I was not frightened of the fog,” Whiteleaf answered. “But the way
tonight seemed long, and suddenly—I don’t know why—I thought you might
not be here!”

“How should I not be here?” Philip murmured, touching the satin
smoothness of her cheek with his lips as lightly as a butterfly’s wings
brush the petals of a flower. “This car is our home, and how beautiful
you make it every time you come!”

“Tonight I see nothing but darkness,” Whiteleaf said with a little laugh
of mockery, “but comfortable I can still try to make it. Here is a
thermos full of coffee and a packet of sandwiches. Eat and drink! I was
sorry to make you dash up our mountain in this fog so late in the day,
but for Henriette what has happened is a great adventure, the greatest
perhaps in her life—indeed it is her life! And I did not dare to risk
its going wrong. Now she is at peace, and Myra will sit with her till I
return. So perhaps we can have one hour together? But you will have so
short a night, after you drive back, two such short nights, Philip, and
I am responsible for them!”

“I shall have been with you—I am already rested—and you were right to
send for me both times. But I must confess I asked myself why that white
woman was there at the annex again tonight?”

Whiteleaf withdrew herself a little, but her head still leaned against
his shoulder and she kept her small strong hands in his. “She has a
right, Mrs. Armstrong,” Whiteleaf murmured, “since the child loves her.
Philip, you will think me very small and foolish when I tell you that I
am jealous of this love. All these months I have worked on that little
body and tried to draw strength out of her captive mind, and this girl
comes—suddenly, by accident, without work, and the child moves! For
this woman, for a few French words with the right accent—because of a
doll from Paris—life is given back to Henriette! Can you believe that I
should mind?”

“Without your work,” Philip told her dryly, “without the Kenny
treatment, no amount of dolls from Paris would have helped Henriette.
When these cases at last release themselves it is always very mysterious
and seems like a miracle. But I told you from the first, the blood
vessels were not shriveled, I always believed that Henriette could
regain movement, and that the root of the delay in her recovery from
illness was shock. I saw her when the boat landed. She was very nearly
dead, and though she recovered physically, something was blocked in her,
so that when this illness seized her she had not the full strength
needed to respond to the treatment. The great miracle is all yours, my
darling. Mrs. Armstrong’s part in it was the merest chance—a
resemblance perhaps to the child’s mother. I saw that Mrs. Armstrong
herself had been crying. Perhaps she is a hysterical type, yet she
behaved well last night—considering!”

Whiteleaf shifted in his arms, took a cigarette, lit it, and gave Philip
one, lighting it from her own, then she said very slowly, and with
little pauses to inhale, “What do you make of her, this English girl,
with whom you were alone for the first time last night?”

“I make nothing of her,” Philip replied brusquely. “You know as well as
I do what any colored man thinks of a white woman when he sees her alone
for the first time. He realizes that his manhood is a passive insult to
her, and he behaves accordingly. If he has any pride he ignores her. If
she speaks to him it is like a person on a cliff throwing a pebble into
the sea. A man is, after all, a man as well as a human being. If he is a
busy man with a satisfied heart as I am, he will not have even the
flicker of a desire for such a woman, yet the knowledge of how she would
repudiate such a desire makes him hate her at first sight. If she is a
decent woman and treats him like a human being, he may in time get over
this feeling, but dislike is his first reaction, and it was mine last
night.”

“Yet she is not altogether to be disliked,” Whiteleaf said mildly. “She
is human—I might almost say that she is human _first_, before she is a
white woman.”

“That would be saying a good deal,” Philip observed ironically. “I
believe that Mrs. Armstrong _did_ talk to me in a way they consider
friendly. The English have a superficially intimate and most misleading
way of talking to strangers when they decide to unburden themselves of
speech at all. They speak as if they really wanted to know you, and they
take it for granted that you must want to know them—I can’t think why.”

“Perhaps that is true,” Whiteleaf agreed, puffing contentedly at her
cigarette. “I think in general the English do not wish either to be
intimate or to be an enemy. It is quite strange how hard it is to force
enmity into the English. One would have thought the Germans would have
succeeded, but we may find even they have not. This girl is casual and
kind—very kind, Philip—and that is all she is.”

“And does it matter,” Philip inquired, “what she is?” and as he asked
Whiteleaf he drew her closer into his arms. Whiteleaf did not answer his
question directly; before she spoke again she put out her cigarette and
was silent for a long time, her head against his heart. At last she
said: “Do you think them—European women—more beautiful than ours?
Their pink color and the way their eyes are shaped, perhaps? I have
looked at Mrs. Armstrong carefully, for I believe she is better-looking
than most English girls on this island. She has also a sort of fineness.
And I ask myself, What to an Asiatic or to a West Indian man does she
really look like? What do you think of her yourself, Philip?”

“I have never looked closely at any white woman,” Philip answered after
a reflective pause. “If I pass them on a beach bathing, I think their
bodies ungraceful and without curves—perhaps a very few stand out as
worth a second glance, but most of them resemble a boy in early
adolescence. This is a very nice sight too, and you say to yourself if
he is a good specimen, ‘This boy will turn out well,’ but he is not yet
turned out. Possibly these English girls suffer from the same
inhibitions in their minds. They are stiff little creatures compared to
West Indian or Asiatic girls, and if they are not stiff they cringe and
poke their heads. As for their color, as most of it comes out of pots or
is lost in powder, I do not always know where or what it is. I would as
soon kiss a scarlet letter box as their lips.”

“But Lucy is not very like such women,” Whiteleaf reminded him. “Her
cheeks are their own color. I do not think there is paint on her lips,
and as for her eyes, I must say, Philip, they are a most heavenly blue!”

“It does not interest me very much to talk of her!” Philip said, moving
impatiently. “What I _do_ know about her is that she takes her times off
with Robert Anstruther. You can very well imagine that _his_ friends are
not people I should care to consider favorably!”

“But she cannot know what happened to Jenny—seven years ago,” Whiteleaf
objected gently. “I sometimes wish she knew a little more about us
all—for her own safety.”

“Well, yes, I too am sorry,” Philip admitted, “that this girl has made
such a dangerous friendship with Elvira, but what can we do about it?
After all, it is not our business what mistakes she makes.”

“But perhaps it _is_ a little our business!” Whiteleaf objected softly.
“I believe she truly wants to help our children. She is already loved by
them. Except for that bad little group of Elvira’s, all are drawn toward
her. She gives them knowledge. You who think always of this Island,
Philip, and what is good for it, would wish to protect any white person
who wants to help us, would you not?”

Philip tossed his lighted cigarette into the fog and waited for the hiss
it gave as the grass touched it, before he answered Whiteleaf.

“Yes, I do want her to be protected! We need education on this Island as
a man dying of thirst in a desert needs water. Certainly we owe
something to those who try to bring it to us. But what particular danger
do you think threatens her?”

“I do not like coincidences,” Whiteleaf said cautiously, “especially I
do not like them when they seem to lead in the same direction. It was a
coincidence that Elvira was out last night—she was in charge—she meets
mysterious friends on the road in this fog, in which it is already
mysterious that she should have gone for a walk. Adassa, to whom she
telephones, forgets to give her message to Mrs. Armstrong. Margorie, who
is always to keep an eye on those two mischiefs, Petronella and Angela,
lets them elude her. She then suggests to Mrs. Armstrong at ten o’clock
at night where these girls are. Margorie Fielding has lived many years
on this Island, she must know that to go to a roadhouse at night to
bring back unwilling dark girls is hardly the task for a strange white
woman. Is it conceivable that Elvira is not concerned in all this? That
she gave Margorie no explanation, no orders before she goes off into
that fog?”

“What _is_ between them?” Philip asked irritably. “What is between
adolescent girls and older women, when an older woman wants power as a
dope fiend wants dope?” Whiteleaf answered.

“I should suppose every gratification possible to lovers—without
release. I am sure Elvira would avoid, and indeed has no need for
physical surrenders. She can get what she wants from such girls without
it.”

Philip laughed. “You know her about as well as I do,” he admitted. “She
is like an octopus wanting its dinner—eight arms to reach it with, and
that omnivorous stomach into which to pour her prey. If one arm misses,
she has the other seven to fall back on. Well, so she held me once as a
boy. Every dream I had was Elvira’s, and crushed by her. God! I was glad
to get away to England! And it was due to _you_, Whiteleaf, that the boy
she trapped never came back to her.”

“That he did not will hardly make her safer for other women,” Whiteleaf
reminded Philip. “I think Elvira has had enough of men—her career is
now her main object. Ask yourself is it likely that Elvira will let her
school stay in this white girl’s hands?”

“But what can she do about it?” Philip demanded uncomfortably. “The
committee made their choice. King’s House backed it—an inconceivably
foolish choice, I agree, to send a girl of that age to take over from a
woman ten years her senior and of such a type as Elvira. But the thing’s
done. I don’t see that Elvira can do anything beyond what she has set
out to do—charm Mrs. Armstrong into an obedient tool. Certainly I can’t
prevent her, and I am sure you have already done all you could.”

“I fear it is not so simple,” Whiteleaf said with a sigh. “The girl has
character. She is not supine. This morning she held a staff meeting to
settle what should be done with the two girls. It was a clever move and
she made a good decision to which each of us had contributed, but we
decided what was against Elvira’s expressed wishes. Of course Mrs.
Armstrong does not know the full strength of Elvira’s wishes. Petronella
is Elvira’s child.”

“That I did not know myself!” Philip exclaimed in astonishment. “I knew
she had one, a white man’s child, long ago when she was fooling me. No
doubt I would have accepted the child _as_ mine—which was her
intention—if I had not found out that she had lied to me. Even at
sixteen I could not swallow lies. If Petronella really was this child I
can see very well that Elvira might become dangerous in order to save
her.”

“She _must_ get rid of Mrs. Armstrong now,” Whiteleaf said firmly. “And
she must do it soon, before Christmas, when Lucy has arranged to have
the girls privately withdrawn by their families. As to enchant Mrs.
Armstrong has not been enough, Elvira will soon become violent.”

“Yes, she will get by guile what she _can_, and only by force what she
must,” Philip agreed. “Have you no access to the committee?”

“Oh, yes, I have access,” Whiteleaf laughed. “By some of them I am very
highly considered, but you must not forget that I am an Asiatic _and_
that I have no proofs! Elvira has covered her tracks well—she is so
respected and respectable. She goes to church and loves the King of
England. Of what use is access to the committee against all that? _I_
have no religion, I am only a Chinese, and as for as kings go, it is
even suspected that I am a Communist!”

“Can Nancy Peck do nothing?” Philip asked. “She is a good girl. She
lives under the same roof with Elvira and has common sense. You might
get her to speak plainly to the committee—about Elvira’s exerted
attraction over the older girls. I suppose they _just_ know such things
exist and are not advisable?”

“And if she does—but she will not—would either Mrs. Armstrong or the
committee believe her? Besides, Nancy is afraid. Something happened not
long ago which upset her. She is a good girl, as you say, but she has
not much courage. All that she has goes into her arms and legs. You
cannot explain Duppys to committees without courage.”

“Obeah!” Philip cried. “How has that got in? Such a thing is
unbelievable in a good school.”

“One evening when Mrs. Armstrong went to bed,” Whiteleaf related with a
gravity that matched his own, “while she was undressing she noticed a
strange and disagreeable smell. It seemed to come from the bed, so she
turned down the sheets and there lay a Johnny Crow, quite dead, of
course—you know how the bird hangs—after rain to dry his wings, as if
crucified—his shabby lattice wings stretched out on either side of him?
His snake-small, evil head, pink and bare, stretched out on her pillow.
An ugly thing for a young woman to find in her bed. Nancy’s room is next
to hers and it was to Nancy that Mrs. Armstrong went.

“‘What was it done for?’ the English girl asked her. She was puzzled and
not frightened, Nancy said. Nancy, knowing it was Obeah, was terrified.
‘I am afraid someone wishes to do you harm,’ she answered at last. ‘Of
course I am very fond of birds,’ Mrs. Armstrong said, ‘but this is such
an ugly one. I couldn’t mind its being dead less. I think this must just
be a practical joke. We will throw it into the dustbin and say nothing
about it. This will disappoint whoever did it.’ And so—as a joke—the
Johnny Crow went into the dustbin.”

“Who did it?” Philip asked fiercely. “I must see MacTaggert at once
about it. Ransom will be furious when I tell him. We have got to find
out who is responsible.”

“It is not easy to kill such a bird, in just that manner,” Whiteleaf
said thoughtfully. “Not Elvira, I think—she does not give warnings. No
other teacher—these older women have a horror of Obeah because they
were brought up to fear it, and also because they look upon it as a
social _gaffe_! Adassa, Elvira’s maid, perhaps. Perhaps Petronella or
one of the older girls, if they had the nerve and the knowledge! Myra
tried to find out who did it, but there was no trace of it—no
excitement in the school—no whisper about it.”

“I don’t like what you tell me,” Philip said. “It is much more serious
than I thought. We must do what we can. You must go back now and get
some sleep. You need rest, my darling. For two nights now neither of us
has had very much, and all for the sake of a silly young Englishwoman,
who means nothing to either of us. Do not mix yourself up with what goes
on at the school. I’ll speak to MacTaggert tomorrow.”

Whiteleaf drew his head down to her lips and kissed him with the same
firm tenderness with which she had greeted him, then with a long sigh
that welled up slowly from the bottom of her heart, she slipped out of
his arms into the wet darkness.




                             _CHAPTER XIV_


A wind blew over the summit to the sea, and at dawn the fog broke into
strange drifting figures, slender ribbons, spirals and even balls of
mist. They danced across the terrace of Everslade in a majestic saraband
sinking into the dark mass of the old mansion, as if recalled by an
invisible dancing master.

One star shone in the pale sky, remote and aloof, even from the ether
through which it swung, vanished suddenly, and left the blue dome empty
for the day.

At the gate of the mist-drenched garden Bob Anstruther held two horses,
a black and a bay, their coats groomed to a gleaming satin. “I wanted to
get the whole of your one free day,” Bob said to Lucy as he mounted her
on the tall black stallion, “so I suited before the fog broke. I’m not
going to share your company with any of our greedy planters.
W.A.A.F.-heroine fever has seized the Island! Everyone wants to meet
you, but today I’ve something to show you very few people have seen.
Nero will carry you like a padded rock, but it’s a long ride.” Lucy felt
as she mounted Nero as if she had come back to something that especially
belonged to her. She looked down at Bob from her seat on the big
considerate stallion with the same happy sense of possession. She felt
this morning as if she knew Bob as a mother knows her son. She liked his
well-cut riding breeches, his open shirt, showing the white bare column
of his throat. There was no mystery in the willful mouth and clear gray
eyes looking upward into her own. The black horse shifted to accustom
himself to the light, firm figure above him.

“All you’ve got to do is to trust him,” Bob assured her, mounting his
own restless bay. “Are you all right? We climb first.”

Lucy nodded. The black horse moved with a strong, even stride, sure of
himself and hardly conscious of his light rider. The wind blew in their
faces with extraordinary freshness and freedom, as if it were just
released from long captivity.

The clusters of blue petunia blossoms on the Lignum Vitae wavered and
danced like butterflies. The mountains, flooded with golden light after
their three-day fog, shone with untinctured splendor. Green was not a
color but an orchestra of a hundred instruments, each surrendering its
individual tone, to form the general harmony. Little flowers shot out of
fern shadows, ginger and orange, rose color or blue. From a stream’s
side a lily rose against its background of dark green with such
startling whiteness that it looked as if it had been dipped in milk.
Birds spilled their first songs into the air, each song a different
device to snare a lover, mockingbird, canary, and linnet. Behind these
distincter messages the wood doves never ceased their background of
wistful soft complaint.

Wrapped in the first gentleness of the sunlight, Lucy forgot her
problems. She wished that she could ride forever through fragrant air
while the light flickered between wet leaves. Bob sat erect and yet
elastic, singing a tuneless melody to himself, as if he too had slipped
beyond private concerns into a genial realm where memory was blotted
out. It was very easy to talk to him. Lucy never had to think what to
say next or to ask herself if Bob would mind what she said. Their
country and its habits of life were equally a part of them.

The moment Lucy saw Bob she had realized that the most vital thing that
could happen to the Island was the next visit of the M.C.C. The races
ranked second in importance, and finally there would be the tennis
tournament, and both Bob and Lucy were strong players. She _must_ go in
for the tournament, Bob assured her as they reached the Gap, school or
no school. Besides, nothing could be better for Everslade than a
headmistress who could beat the Island champion. Mrs. Watkins had been
the champion far too long anyhow; the Island liked changes.

“Yes, but, Bob,” Lucy complained, “there is another island here—surely
you forget almost all my children are dark, and so are their parents.
I’m not at all sure they’d like my giving up my time to practice tennis
when I ought to be running their school.”

They stood their horses for a breather on the top of the ridge. A steady
stream of air caught them up into itself. Beneath them the forest
covered the slopes in a dense cloak of green, striped with gorges full
of purple mist.

“After all, the British _are_ the Island,” Bob reminded Lucy. “We
conquered it—we’ve held it for three hundred years—it’s ours.” “Does
conquering make a thing ours?” Lucy asked herself, gazing in silence
down toward the quivering plain.

Foothills feathered with waving palms broke away from the mountainside,
each one a secret kingdom, their little valleys closed into invisibility
by the waving foliage. Pines changed to palms and Flames-of-the-Forest
punctuated the green background like blazing torches. By the water
course that descended with them ferns were as tall as trees.
Occasionally a leaf-thatched wooden shack crouched back from a
precipitous turn of the path, until the ridge itself melted into a
distant line of blue. “Here’s an even bit of land where we can stretch
the horses,” Bob told her. Obediently Lucy put the steel-muscled Nero
into a canter. Peacock blue and emerald green, the Island flowed past.
It did not look particularly English.

“As for the Americans,” Bob continued, pulling up with a cautious trot
as the path jerked downward, “they’re perfectly sound about sport and
with us to a man.”

“Why must we always talk, whether we’re English or American,” Lucy
asked, “as if we mattered most?”

“Because I suppose we _do_!” Bob answered in a shocked and puzzled
voice. “We planters aren’t such a bad set really, Lucy. All the darkies
know, we’ve taught them. They share quite a lot of our tastes too. You
ought to see the crowd that turns up for a cricket match, and even when
they’re practically starving over there in the red dust land they have
regattas of their own—jolly good ones, too.”

Lucy was silent. She wasn’t quite sure herself what she felt about the
Island, but she knew the test of possession wasn’t cricket matches or
regattas.

After a time, as they picked their way slowly down the precipitous
bridle path, Lucy asked, “What did you really think about that roadhouse
trouble—did I do right about those girls?”

“Yes, I should think so,” Bob answered slowly over his shoulder. “I was
sorry for the poor little brats though, and of course, I don’t think you
ought to have gone there yourself—even with MacTaggert. It was nice of
you, of course, but I didn’t somehow like to think of it. All those
fellows staring at you and even turning nasty and shouting things
perhaps. Still, if MacTaggert thought it was all right I expect it was.
Did you know he preached about it last Sunday? Don’t look so startled.
The men talked, of course, so anyhow the beans had been already spilled.
Our cook goes to his church and she seemed to think he’d been pretty
fine explaining it all to them. The men had been on their ear at first,
about the girls being penalized for having their bit of fun. Well, it
seems old MacTaggert painted up the Island for them—said what fine
women they had, and ought to have, and how it would never do to get
these girls into bad ways and all that. What pleased the men most
apparently was that you’d listened to Nancy Peck, who’s one of
themselves, though mind you, in a perfectly different category, the pick
of the Island. It was as if you’d foisted on them their own Joan of Arc!
And after MacTaggert told them that, he got them eating out of his
hand.”

They came out on to a bare hillside with disheveled little wooden
shacks, a locked, dim-windowed church, and a small scattered crowd of
children, donkeys, and goats. “They call this part of the country
Friendship.” Bob laughed apologetically. “I suppose they’re all at
daggers drawn, poor fellows. There’s hardly anything they can cultivate
on such a slope, except yams, and I’m told they steal each other’s. See
that barn? It’s their school, and quite a good one, I believe. Anyhow
it’s the center of any decent life there is for twenty miles round. They
haven’t a yard for the children to play in; the only bit of level ground
is the churchyard. The church is locked though the school’s far too
full, and they aren’t allowed the use of it. The Church of England
parson keeps away and has the key. Well, you can’t blame parsons
altogether, though I believe the Romans and the Free Churches do better.
Probably the Friendship parson lives miles away, has no car and half a
dozen churches to look after. Nobody helps these people except a colored
doctor, who hasn’t a bean and no time to spare, but he comes up once a
fortnight for a day to look after them and has actually started a baby
clinic, though he hasn’t a spot to see them in except half a shed,
shared with goats and chickens. It’s pretty rough luck for this part of
the country. The hurricane took the life out of them and the rest of the
Island just keep away. Now we’re on the flat again—we can go.”

The wind blew in soft, wild, and wet from the sea. A grass path led them
over black rocks and stubble, across open bogland to the shore. Long
swathes of coconut palm lay in mangled heaps, their tortured upflung
branches stretched in the abandonment of a forgotten battlefield. As far
as Lucy could see there was nothing but desolation. The cliff rose
suddenly and obscured the sea.

“Now we leave the main road,” Bob said quietly. “Look where you’re
going.” He pulled back the boughs of what had seemed an impassable
thicket and disclosed a narrow grass path. Nero padded his way through
and the branches dropped behind him. The undergrowth was so thick they
could see nothing on either side of them. The path dropped suddenly to a
small grassy plateau. Between high and wooded cliffs there was a strip
of golden-white sand. The stream they had followed over the mountainside
reappeared across the sand and dropped from a green jade pool, like a
rush of diamonds toward the sea. A grove of coconut trees, slender and
undamaged, strode to the waves’ edge. The cliffs were covered with
undergrowth. Tall ferns played their leaf shadows across the pool, pink
orchids sprang from the trunks of trees.

The sea was a deep turquoise blue, edged with white foam. “Bob,” Lucy
cried, “this _must_ be paradise!” To Lucy’s astonishment Bob said
nothing at all. He did not even smile. It was curious that he should not
wish to share the incredible beauty he had brought Lucy to see.

“You’d think not even Robinson Crusoe had landed here,” Lucy cried.
“But, look, beyond those coconut trees, isn’t there a sort of shack with
a bougainvillaea spreading over it, as if someone had once lived there?”

“It’s just a bathing hut,” Bob told her without following her eyes. “You
can undress there—it’s hot enough for a bathe. I did tell you to bring
something to bathe in, didn’t I? Funny about that bougainvillaea,” he
added in an undertone, as if he were speaking to himself. He shouted,
and as his voice rang from cliff to cliff a strange mocking echo
followed it.

A man came out of the bushes. He came rather reluctantly forward, a
tattered, emaciated man. Neither he nor Bob—though it was apparent that
they knew each other—seemed particularly pleased at this meeting. The
man took the horses and moved away from them, erect and careless, as if
the sea and his own loneliness had given him, in spite of his starved
look, a special courage. He was not in the least afraid of Bob, Lucy
thought, but he didn’t like him, and this was odd because Bob had a
friendly and pleasant way of talking to natives, as if, even when they
were strangers, he already knew them.

“He’s good with horses,” Bob said grudgingly, looking after the man.

“But how on earth did you know he was here?” Lucy demanded.

“Well, he should be somewhere about—he squats on the cliff. As a matter
of fact this place belongs to me and I let him stay on, provided he
doesn’t let anyone else near, rent free. He can cultivate enough to live
on, what he likes, where he likes, but he must keep his goats and
children away from the cove. Whenever I turn up I give him something
extra. As a matter of fact I haven’t been here since I got back, so he
quite well might _not_ have been handy. I just took a chance. Ready for
a bathe?”

Lucy said she was. She found the hut clean, with a wooden floor. It was
large enough to live in, but there was no furniture, only a few nails on
the walls, as if pictures had once hung there.

“Quite a lot of little things to remember,” Bob told Lucy as they ran
together hand in hand toward the sea. “Fish, currents, undertow—that
reef over there sucks you in like the dickens if you go too near it.
Best way is to swim straight out, half as far as you feel you can, and
keep in line with the coconuts while you swim back.”

The first wave slipped seductively around Lucy and then she found
herself suddenly out in a sea so alive with salt that it seemed to have
a personality of its own. She had never been so managed by the sea
before. No two waves came the same way, and even when they had swum into
deep water where there was nothing but a rhythmic swell, a sudden wave
might rear itself up and break all over you without the least warning.

“Feel all right?” Bob asked.

“I feel too good to be true,” laughed Lucy. She had a new kind of body
in this bright and willful sea, all the things she had learned about
swimming she had to adjust to its enchanting irregularities. She was
lighter than she had ever dreamed of being, and the sea, though less
amenable to her knowledge of it, seemed prepared to do more for her.
They swam out untiringly to a steady American crawl, but as Bob had told
her, swimming back was a different matter. The indulgent sea, obedient
to their every whim, their playfellow, became suddenly a stringent
element alive to its own purposes. The coconut trees were pulled
backward by an invisible hand, all the swimmers’ strength had to be used
to keep them from being carried toward the black reef.

“I can give you a tow if you want it,” Bob shouted, but Lucy, sinking
deeper into the water, fought for herself inch by inch. She swam deep
and took her breath economically, turning on her back to rest, her toes
pointed. The sky swooped down on her blue and gold, gold and blue, and
there was Bob’s voice again, “We’re nearly in,” and suddenly, “Let your
feet down, and mind the surf!” Lifted in, and then thundered over as if
she were caught by a waterfall, Lucy clung to the wet, warm sand.

It was over. The new element had gone, the heat swirled over her. They
lay on the sand side by side under the shelter of a tall drooping fern,
and watched the fish riding the surf in from the sea. A parrot fish,
blue as a kingfisher, flashed magnificently past them upstream, into the
green jade pool. Shoals of semitransparent fish with a faint pink glow
from the light on the water pushed their wavering, less impulsive way up
the stream. Fish coming down from the pool toward the sea glided by so
fast the eye could hardly seize them.

“It’s like watching a Disney film creating itself,” Lucy whispered. “Do
you see how their hearts beat through their cheeks? I shall never feel
fish can’t be hurt any more!”

Bob had stored their lunch between two wet stones, well covered from the
impassioned curiosity of an army of crabs. It was intact and they ate in
wild rapture. Cider tasted like champagne. Lulled by sun and air, with
Bob’s rucksack under her head, Lucy dropped asleep. When she woke she
saw by the depth of the shadows under the palms that it must be late
afternoon.

There was no sign of Bob. The cove was hushed in golden peace. Only the
stream made a sound, idly and inconsequently, as it slipped over the
polished stones while further off the sea beat its hollow song at the
sand’s edge. The wind had dropped and no leaf stirred. A few yards from
where Lucy lay, clear of the cliff’s undergrowth, sailed a splendid
bird. Its great wings flapped with soundless ease, its long, slim pink
legs trailed in the sunny air. The bird was so dazzlingly white and
luminous that Lucy thought, “This can’t be real, it’s part of a dream.”
Arching its wings against the invisible air, and taking a slow,
intricate turn, the snow-white heron headed out to sea. Was it the
wind’s sigh, or the sigh of a human being, so close to Lucy’s face? The
sound followed the flight of the bird. Once more the cove was empty of
any life except Lucy’s own. “Bob,” she called a little shakily, “Bob,
where are you?”

Bob’s voice answered her reassuringly. He must have been dressing behind
a rock on the far side of the cove. He came slowly toward her through
the coconut grove, a coconut in his hand.

“Do you want to go all out, Robinson Crusoe?” he asked Lucy. “It’s a
good drink and I found my old machete.” He opened the shaggy ball,
turning it into a goblet for its own milk. “You’d better dress,” Bob
told her reprovingly. “You’ll catch cold. How incredibly white you are,
Lucy! I suppose you’ll get beige and bronze like the rest of us soon.
Had enough?” Bob took the coconut away from her, turning it carefully so
that he drank from the place Lucy’s lips had touched. His eyes met hers
with a serious, unsmiling tenderness.

Lucy hoped that Bob wouldn’t make love to her. She thought to herself,
“If he does, it’ll spoil our day.” But she was rather surprised that Bob
didn’t make love to her, and left the day unspoiled.

The tattered skeleton brought back the horses; rubbed down, fed and
watered, they looked as fresh as when they had started. Bob lifted Lucy
onto Nero’s back and turned away a little to speak to the man. The man
took the money Bob gave him without a nod, and while Bob was mounting
Lucy watched his eyes grow heavy with hate as he gazed after Bob. They
looked like black polished stone. Yet Bob had spoken nicely to the
fellow, he had given him money. The man didn’t look at Lucy at all. She
might not have been there for all the notice he took of her. He did not
answer her good-by to him either, but turned his back and vanished into
the bushes without a glance or a sound.

“I don’t think I ever want to see that cove again,” Lucy said as she and
Bob took their last look at it together. “Why not?” Bob exclaimed,
astonished. “I thought you’d fallen in love with the place.”

“That’s just why,” Lucy answered. “It’s too beautiful to believe in. I
feel as if I’d walked out of the world and I have a feeling you can’t do
that twice, and come back alive. That cove is like a dream—not even my
own—it’s like somebody else’s dream. I know it sounds queer, but I had
the feeling all the time I was there that it _did_ belong to somebody
else.”

Bob stared back at Lucy, his hand pressed hard on his horse’s flank.

“Belonged to somebody else?” he said slowly and incredulously. “Well, it
doesn’t, Lucy. I thought I’d told you I bought it for a song, donkey’s
years ago. As far as it belongs to anyone, it belongs to me. I’ve never
shown it to a soul since the war, and I never intend to show it to
anyone but you.”




                              _CHAPTER XV_


The golden day was closing fast when Bob rode away into the shadows. No
child was visible on the terrace. The great house seemed to have moved
back and to have become a part of the peak behind it.

Lucy paused on her way upstairs to listen for an accustomed sound, but
she heard nothing at all, not the tinkle of a teacup nor a child’s
voice. Then the silence broke and the shadowy mansion filled to the brim
with music. “It’s Grace,” Lucy reminded herself. “They’re singing the
Amen.”

Phrase by phrase, the ascending melody floated through the darkening
house. The Amen had reached its last reiterated close when Lucy leaned
for a moment against her balcony rail to watch the vanishing light. The
rail she leaned on moved a little under her weight, and then with a
sickening jerk she found herself clinging to sticky closed convolvulus
in the empty air. She tried to move back as the rail fell outward, but
someone or something pushed her forward. Her hands tore vainly at the
unsubstantial creepers. The crash when it came seemed to end the earth
as well as Lucy.

When she woke both time and space had disappeared. She was conscious
only of sensation. Violent rending pain beat through her head, and wave
after wave of acute nausea swept over her. She heard a low voice saying,
“She’s coming round.” “Round where?” Lucy thought irritably. When she
lifted with incredible difficulty the weight of her eyelids, a faint
light hideously assailed her. She could have screamed to be back again
in complete darkness.

She found herself looking into a handsome, arrogant face, half-known but
nameless. The brooding, luminous dark eyes under thick black eyebrows
looked not unkindly into hers. Her eyes followed his presence more
easily than her mind. Something banged and ached in her head as if it
were a door that couldn’t stop slamming, and she could only think
between the slams.

“Who are you?” Lucy murmured, with long pauses between the escaping
words.

“I am Philip Calgary,” the face answered rather severely. “You have had
slight concussion from a fall and your arm is broken. I have set it for
you. It’s in plaster so you won’t be able to move it just yet.” A very
gentle and yet penetrating voice asked, “Shall I give the injection
now?”

There seemed, however, not to be two people in the room, but one. Lucy
could not explain to herself how this was since there were two voices.
Philip’s voice said, “Yes,” yet the being whose skilled hands touched
her with such firm lightness and the slight prick on her arm that
followed seemed to emanate from the same mind, the same will, the same
strong understanding serenity.

The pain receded slowly, as if what had been part of Lucy had now become
an onlooker. Philip’s eyes, meeting hers, smiled. “You’ll be better
now,” he said. It was as if a lantern had been lit behind the heavy
brows. All Philip’s hidden humor, courage, and indomitable patience—the
essential friendliness of the man himself—flashed into his brief smile,
then his lips closed as if he had betrayed a secret to an enemy. “It is
not necessary for you to see me again,” he said coldly. “I will ring up
Lemon, and I’m sure he’ll come—at the latest tomorrow. You have only to
keep still, and you’ll be all right. The sickness will pass.”

“Oh, but why?” Lucy cried. “Please come back, don’t send for Dr. Lemon!”
It was incredible to her, in the sinking darkness, to lose that strong,
trusted face.

“You _must_ go on helping her,” the other voice said urgently, but still
as if the heart to which Whiteleaf spoke was not a separate heart.

“Because you are white, and I am not,” Philip answered Lucy, hardly
moving his lips to say it.

“Please stay! Please go on helping me!” Lucy cried, before the door in
her head slammed fast and left her in outer darkness.

When she emerged from the black world where there was only sensation
without sense, Lucy found herself once more within time and space.
Indeed the first words she said were “What time is it?” The room was
darkened and yet Lucy had a feeling that there was light outside. She
was not in her own room, the shaded lamp behind her revealed its clean
emptiness. The walls were whitewashed, the ceiling was a smooth painted
white, the floor was covered with glistening tiles. There was no
furniture except the bed on which Lucy lay. Opposite her, a white
porcelain vase stood on the floor holding a branch of poorman’s orchid.
This divided flower, half white, half dawn pink, so beautifully
balanced, and with each delicate blossom carved upon the air, made her
cry aloud, “But it’s a Chinese room!”

“Yes, it’s mine,” Whiteleaf answered tranquilly. “It was the least noisy
and I can keep it darker than the others. It is at the back of the
annex. The window is close to you and when you can bear the light you
will be able to see the peak.” As white as the room, as noiseless as a
flower, Whiteleaf moved, so that Lucy’s eyes rested on her small,
immaculate figure without effort.

“It is ten o’clock in the morning,” Whiteleaf told her, “and now you may
have some tea, and since the pain must still be bad, an aspirin.” It was
curious how Lucy could see Whiteleaf and the room quite plainly for a
moment and the next they were vague and indistinct as if walls of fog
separated them from her sight.

She saw Philip more steadily when he came again. He was as tall as
Michael and as well made, but Philip had a sort of tough litheness about
him, different from Michael’s slightly rigid stateliness.

Philip sat down by Lucy’s bedside this time, instead of standing over
her, and nothing was as gigantic about him as she had thought, though he
still made the rest of the room look small. Lucy guessed how gentle his
strong fingers could be before he touched her.

“I’m not going to hurt you much,” he said quietly. “I’m just going to
see how the scalp wound looks.” Whiteleaf brought him a bowl and a
towel. Everything Lucy needed came and went on a small glass table that
moved noiselessly on rubber wheels.

The shutters of the windows were open, and the room was full of soft,
shaded light, screened by heavy awnings.

“The scalp is healing up nicely,” Philip said with satisfaction. “The
skull isn’t fractured—just rather a hard knock. I had to cut your hair
away from each side of the wound, but it’ll soon grow again. It’s thick,
healthy hair.”

Lucy thought of the things other men had said of her hair, and smiled.
Philip’s lips looked for a moment as if they were going to smile too,
but he stopped them in time. A sphinx couldn’t have looked graver, Lucy
thought, sitting alone for thousands of years on empty sand. “I don’t
remember your cutting my hair,” she said reflectively.

“With concussion,” Philip explained, “you are not always quite
conscious.”

“Is that what happened to the time?” Lucy asked anxiously.

“Yes,” Philip told her, “that’s what happened, but don’t be afraid.
You’re not going to run away from time again. It will act as time
usually acts, and run away from you. Just sleep whenever you can now,
and don’t talk more than you must.”

“How much time,” Lucy demanded, “did I run away from?” Philip was
silent. Having rebandaged Lucy’s head, he was feeling her pulse with his
long steady fingers.

“A little over a week,” he told Lucy at last. “You came round much
sooner, but not for any length of time. Now you’ll be all right except
for headaches. Your arm will heal in no time. I shall take the plaster
off next week.”

“Oh!” cried Lucy, while pain tore through her head like an angry animal.
“But the school, the school! What can they think of me? How could I have
been such a _fool_ as to fall off my balcony?”

Whiteleaf, moving softly as a shadow, stood between Lucy and the light.

“Nobody thinks the worse of you for an accident,” she said reassuringly,
“and the school is doing wonderfully well. Miss Loring carries out all
your plans with the greatest faithfulness and success. Mrs. Gosse and
Mr. Myers, our committee members, have both been up here, the Bishop’s
telephoned and the Anstruthers—mother and son—have called here twice.
Mr. Robert Anstruther,” Whiteleaf added, her voice taking a slightly
higher pitch, “rings up daily. They ask constantly that you shall go to
their house to recover as soon as you can be moved.”

“Nothing could be more suitable,” Philip said, rising and going to the
window, where he stood with his back to Lucy.

“Did they—did the Anstruthers actually see me?” Lucy asked anxiously.
“I must have looked so awful!”

“You looked—except for the bandage—very tidy,” Whiteleaf told her.
“Everything was in order. They came in only for a moment. It is not good
to talk, whether one is conscious or not, with these head wounds.”

“The children were singing as I came in,” Lucy explained. “They’d hardly
finished when I—I fell. It was dark on the balcony, and perhaps I made
this up, but I _thought_ someone pushed me!”

Philip said, without turning around, “I think you’ve talked enough now.
I shall screen this light.” Darkness and silence were what Lucy most
longed for, and now she had them again.

Yet she felt sorry when she realized that neither Philip nor Whiteleaf
was with her in the darkness.




                             _CHAPTER XVI_


It sometimes seemed to Philip Calgary that his mother knew all that was
necessary for a human being to know. When she became blind and could no
longer register the instant miracle of sight, her mind, retiring into
its new hermitage, bereft of all external stimulants, gradually provided
her with a new means of communication with the outside world.

Jessica Calgary was a silent woman, and through silence everything she
had once seen now spoke to her.

Until her husband’s death, when she was forty, every thought and feeling
she possessed ran into her husband’s heart. She had felt with his blood,
seen with his eyes, and made her daily atmosphere out of the weather of
his mind. After his early death Jessica’s heart seemed to stop, and
then, slowly righting itself, it flowed on, into her son’s, yet there
was a great gulf in the source of living between mother and son. Jessica
Calgary had been educated by life, Philip by books as well as life.

His father had sold the land they possessed near the great seaport of
St. George’s to the Government for a fair price, in order to give his
son the best education in his power. Only forest land, high up on the
mountainside, remained to him, and there Philip built, after his
father’s death, the house in which his mother lived.

Jessica Calgary’s mother had been a balm woman, and had brought her up
to know the secret plants of the Island and their properties. Even now
she could by the touch of her fingers and the scent on her palms tell
each plant and move with untroubled certainty about her herb garden.
Thyme and aniseed, sage and marjoram were the trusted sentinels of her
small kingdom. Jessica alone knew the names and qualities of the rarer
herbs she had planted, and what she could not grow she could find in
more distant places.

She earned enough to keep herself in sparse and austere comfort, while
Philip fitted himself, in exile, for his career. Balm women were now
forbidden, but Jessica knew people from all over the Island who came to
her regularly still for the ancient remedies. She cultivated all the
crops her mountain land would bear, to live on; cassava, eggplants,
yams, and beans flourished. A deep, sheltered ravine with a stream
running through it was part of their property. Up the steep slope she
planted bananas and coffee berries. Close to the house pimento trees
with their greenish bark and dark glossy leaves glowed like old bronze
when a sunbeam touches it. Breadfruit trees and mangoes gave their fine
deep shade to rest in, and provided her with fruit. Jessica knew each
separate tree by touch, and where the wild birds nested. As for her
chickens, their dangers and their habits, Jessica could have written a
treatise on them as profound as any scholar’s.

Now Philip was rich, and could give her far more than she needed. He had
bought her a Seeing Eye dog who took her wherever she wished to wander,
far up the mountains or deep into the forest. A patient of Philip’s, a
young girl once eaten alive by cruel abscesses but now free and healthy,
full of joy and eagerness for mere living, cared for the needs of their
small household.

All day long friends passed by Jessica’s gateway, sometimes on donkeys
going to market, sometimes on foot with burdens on their heads. If
Jessica was on the veranda they would stop at her gate, or sit with her
for hours, slowly giving up to her the problems of their lives. Either
Whiteleaf or Myra O’San visited her as soon as their day’s work was over
to spend an hour reading aloud to her. For Philip’s sake, his mother
loved Whiteleaf. Her heart accepted this strange Chinese
daughter-in-law, but her mind often rebelled against a woman who would
not make her son a home or give him children.

Nature and God were one to Jessica, and she accepted both without
troubling to sort their differences. What was Communism, she asked
herself, to come between a man and a woman? She saw no sense in such an
alien obedience. Why could not Whiteleaf marry Philip and bear his
children, and having brought them up properly, leave them to choose what
faiths they would?

Jessica had not interfered with Philip’s faith, she had not so much as
asked him what it was. When he was a child she had told him Bible
stories and taught him to obey his father, but in their personal
relationship she had seldom exacted obedience from her son, she had
skirted his strong will, or diverted his attention, and only where
dangers too severe for his small strength confronted him had she
interfered in order to protect him. Every night she read her Bible and
on Sundays she went to church but she did not force Philip to share her
devotions.

Sometimes she talked to him of what she read, but this was when all the
real interests of his long day were over, and he had gone to bed, where
in his desire to extend the joy of living he would have welcomed any
subject that prolonged his waning consciousness. When her blindness
struck her Philip had insisted on her learning to read Braille, and
though it was difficult for her, Jessica had learned it, partly to
please Philip and partly to keep her freedom to read the Bible to
herself when and where she wished. Only once had she actively interfered
with Philip’s life. She had sent him to England for seven years to
escape Elvira. Philip had yielded without dispute and they had never
mentioned the subject again. When he came home, Jessica knew that he was
safe. There did not seem to her to be any other difference in her son.

Once a week, for a single night, he slept under her roof—sometimes, if
chance offered it, oftener. She said to Philip when she knew that he
loved Whiteleaf, “Why do you not go with her to China and become a
Communist, so that you may have a home? I shall be happier here without
you, if you are a father in China with a wife you love, than if you
remain childless by my side.”

“Mother,” Philip had told her, “I cannot run my mind under their harrow;
besides, this Island is my home.” Jessica said no more, but being a
mother, she blamed Whiteleaf. “Communist children,” she thought with
good-tempered scorn, “what nonsense. They would be Philip’s and
Whiteleaf’s children.”

Yet Jessica knew that Whiteleaf gave Philip joy and that she was a
singularly honest, fine, and temperate woman. Jessica knew everything
about Whiteleaf through Philip’s heart, and the two women became
friends. Life was smooth between all three of them. For eight years this
deep frictionless communion passed serenely into their blood. High
winds, droughts, epidemics, earthquakes, the overturn of governments,
the new constitution, Elvira’s control of Everslade so close to them,
made no great difference. Listening to Philip’s voice, to his footsteps,
to the pauses in which his thoughts guarded themselves in vain against
her intuition, Jessica was content. But now this girl, this white girl,
what part was she going to play in their completed lives?

Philip, Jessica told herself, should never have taken on this new case
at Everslade. Never had Philip had to handle a white woman as a patient
before. White children, yes, but not a young woman who might become a
friend.

“They are precious to themselves, the white race,” Jessica told Philip,
“but their cost to us is more than we can afford. Let them alone.”
Whiteleaf had made Philip take this girl to the annex and was looking
after her herself. What a risk for Whiteleaf! Was she not an Asiatic?
And if the girl died under her nursing, what a chance for Elvira to use
Whiteleaf’s compassion as a weapon against her!

“It is never safe to do what is best for the British because of their
prejudices,” Jessica told Whiteleaf. “It is better to let them die in
their own way than to keep them alive in yours.”

“I was not thinking of her as an Englishwoman,” Whiteleaf said
dispassionately as usual. “She is a human being—it seemed fairer to let
her live.”

Jessica said no more, but she thought with indulgent contempt, “Why
should a Communist be fair? It is not their duty—they have no duty,
except to be a Communist. Are there no white doctors on the Island to
save this girl? Will she be fair to Philip when he _has_ saved her?”

When Philip came home to sleep, after attending to the girl, his mother
knew he had not slept. He made no mention of the girl. He talked instead
about the Black River epidemic of typhoid.

There was drought over the red lands much earlier than usual this year,
with a poor catch of fish. Since besides being starved, the patients who
came to the hospital already had hookworm, malaria, and syphilis, they
were not easy to cure of typhoid. Philip said they flared up and went
out like spent matches. He was doing all Jackson’s operations for him,
to free him for the typhoids. Ten hours yesterday, and another batch
today, and then he must come back for a look at this Everslade scalp
wound. It was nasty and had dirt in it.

“And Dr. Lemon, why not let him come to attend to this white woman?”
Jessica asked.

“He knows no more about penicillin than Noah did,” Philip said
contemptuously, “and he is no surgeon anyhow. Besides, as I daresay
Whiteleaf told you, there is something bad going on at Everslade. It is
better to keep it to ourselves till we know what it is. Someone sawed
through the balcony rail Mrs. Armstrong leaned on. It was her day out,
and no one heard her come in. She fell while they were all at supper.
But for Myra, she would not have been found till morning, and might then
have been dead.”

“This Mrs. Armstrong,” Jessica asked, “what does she look like?
Whiteleaf speaks of her to me, and Myra often, but she has not been to
this house, and never has anyone described her looks to me. As for you,
my son, you have never spoken of her at all. I should like to have a
picture of her in my mind.”

Philip pushed back his chair with unnecessary emphasis. “If I’ve not
spoken of her,” he said, “it’s because I don’t know her, and haven’t
looked at her except when I was obliged to make a thorough examination,
for surgical reasons.” The image of Lucy lying on the gravel path like a
trampled flower disturbed Philip’s mind. He wanted to say no more, but
his mother’s waiting silence drew the reluctant words out of him.

“She has no film-star prettiness,” he found himself saying. “She’s not
at all striking, but it would have been a pity if such a face had been
smashed. She is in danger since Elvira plans to get rid of her. It is
this that makes us feel we must look after her.”

Jessica felt his hand on her shoulder, his lips touched her cheek. She
thought, “He is not really touching me. The whole of him is somewhere
else. Why does not Whiteleaf give him what he needs—a home and
children? She makes a mistake, she does not give Philip enough to live
on. Even in his embrace, does she give him all she has? She cannot if
she says ‘No’ anywhere! A woman should say ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ with her
blood. Her whole being should say ‘Yes!’ to her lover! Instead there is
always in Whiteleaf that withdrawal into rigidity! No, it is not enough!
Even _all_ she has is not enough for a woman who loves as she should
love!”

“She will _live_?” Jessica asked as her son reached the door. “This
Englishwoman?”

“If Elvira doesn’t bring it off next time, I suppose so,” Philip
answered impatiently, throwing himself down the steps and into his car
in one elastic plunge. He wanted to make his voice sound as if he didn’t
care, but his mother felt the care he was taking not to care.




                             _CHAPTER XVII_


Lucy thought it extremely odd, and disagreeable as well as odd, for
Philip Calgary to urge upon her the advisability of a week with the
Anstruthers before she returned to her work at the end of the Christmas
holidays.

She even more resented the manner, impersonal and severe, in which he
pressed his advice, without the faintest smile in his eyes, or softening
of his mobile lips.

He simply, she saw, wanted her to go, almost as if to get rid of her was
more important to him than her welfare. Whiteleaf had smilingly
withdrawn directly she had ushered Philip into the little white room.
Lucy was sitting up for the first time, by the open window, facing the
purple mountains. Philip stood while he was talking to her, though
Whiteleaf had left a chair for him. He brushed Lucy’s objections aside
as if they were thistledown.

“No,” he said inflexibly, “it won’t be the same thing to go back to
Everslade and take it easy. Before you return in your official capacity,
you need a change. The air above the bay is good. I’m told that Free
Waters is a comfortable house to stay at. You’ll get every luxury and
every attention, and you’ll be with friends.”

“Well, I’m with friends here,” Lucy objected. “I’ve got Elvira and
Henriette, Myra and Miss Ho Sung—and I have you. Besides, I should look
rather awful with a bandaged head and my arm in a sling. I’d rather wait
till I’m more like myself.”

A thread of a smile touched Philip’s unwilling lips. “I should suggest
your giving yourself a full week,” he persisted. “The Anstruthers have
offered to come over and fetch you. You could be ready by Tuesday.”

“Oh!” Lucy cried in a voice of mingled laughter and dismay. “Do you
really think you can _make_ me go? You know women don’t like looking a
sight on a visit to their special friends!”

Philip gave Lucy a brief glance and then fixed his eyes on the wall
behind her head. “You’re not ‘women,’” he told her impatiently. “You
are, or should be, a sensible girl who wants to get well as quickly as
possible, in order to return to her job in a suitable condition. Any
friend who objected to the sight of a bandage, almost hidden by your
hair, and the temporary use of a sling, would hardly seem worth having.”

Philip, who had been standing by the door since he had looked at Lucy’s
injuries, now turned as if to go. He had hardly been ten minutes in the
room, but he had done his job. He was annoyed with Whiteleaf for not
having stayed with him, and still more annoyed with Lucy for making him
want to stay.

Lucy was silent till Philip turned away from her, then she said, “Well,
of course, I’ll go—since you order it—but before I go will you tell me
why it is you are in such a hurry? I should have thought a visit to the
Anstruthers’ later on—perhaps my next long week-end after term
begins—would have done just as well.”

Philip’s eyes were not hard any more, they looked hurt. He said after a
pause, “I suppose people very seldom give their real reasons to each
other, perhaps not even to themselves. But I do think this change would
be best for you to take _now_ or I should not have urged it. Please
believe that much.”

“I’ll believe anything you tell me,” Lucy said quickly, “if you will
explain what your reasons are _for_ telling me.”

Philip leaned against the door, his figure casting a dark shadow across
the shining white tiled floor. The wind had dropped. The Island floated
in a sea of gold. Girls’ voices in the distance joined the last cries of
the birds.

“This fall that you had from the balcony,” Philip said gravely. “Have
you thought about it at all? When you first came round you said you felt
as if you were pushed by an unseen hand. Do you really think you were
pushed?”

Lucy hesitated. “I didn’t see anyone on the balcony,” she said. “There
wasn’t much light, of course, it must have been eight o’clock. Naturally
I didn’t expect anyone to be there—it only leads out of my bedroom.
Perhaps, though, there might have been someone behind a pillar. I leaned
on the rail to look at the stars, and when I felt it give, I tried to
jump back. I’m pretty quick as a rule, but I found myself falling
forward instead into the purple trumpets. Then I crashed. I think that’s
all there was to it. I realize that Petronella and Angela had a definite
grudge against me, but they were at supper in their usual places.”

“And no one else occurs to you,” Philip asked, “who wasn’t at supper?”

“It was Sunday night,” Lucy said. “Several girls were out or had gone
home, and wouldn’t be in before nine, when they had to be. Miss
Lestrange had her Sunday off. The other teachers were at supper with the
children. It _is_ an old balcony railing. I suppose it just split, and I
wasn’t quite quick enough.”

“It didn’t split,” Philip said quickly, “it had been sawed through. I
examined it after I had attended to your injuries. It was intentional
that you should fall. I would like this business cleared up before you
go back. My asking you to go to the Anstruthers’ now has something to do
with it. Not only would you be safe there, but your being with them in
itself might affect whoever had planned to harm you, and persuade them
not to try again.”

“Why?” asked Lucy, fixing her eyes to his. Philip’s eyebrows rose toward
his hair; his eyes, meeting hers, emptied themselves of all expression.
“You can think that out for yourself,” he suggested.

“Before you go, I want you to tell me more than this,” Lucy said,
ignoring his aloof evasion, “and I want to tell _you_ something, too.
The sawed-through balcony wasn’t everything—there was the dead bird I
found in my bed.”

Philip nodded. “Yes,” he said, “I know about the dead bird. I can’t say
if these two things are connected or not, but I should think it likely.
The bird may have been sent to you as a warning that you’d better not
stay, or if you did stay you’d die like the bird. Have you ever heard of
Obeah?”

“Isn’t it a sort of religion?” Lucy asked.

“It’s a thug’s religion, a black magic,” Philip told her reluctantly.
“It is very rarely practiced on the Island now, but it exists. I believe
it to be the last echo of a slave mentality.”

“Did the slaves that came here,” Lucy asked, “bring their religion with
them?”

“I doubt that,” Philip said dryly. “A savage cult is, I know, the
happiest theory, but I think Obeah is a slave’s religion. You see,
Africans were kidnapped and transported—they did not ‘come’ to the West
Indies. They were brought here under agonizing conditions and kept here
under the lash. No escape was possible except within themselves. My idea
is that people make their own God out of the best or the worst that is
in them. Christians, Buddhists, Jews, all free people, in fact, make
what we call a ‘good’ god. Most of them don’t make the effort to live up
to their conception, but at least what they have put into the fire was
once gold. The more civilized they are the more estimable is their God.
Mahomet wasn’t terribly civilized, but he was no doubt well ahead of the
Arabs of his day, even of ours. The Jews had an exceedingly wise, though
sometimes vindictive god, and their religion was composed of admirable
moral and hygienic laws. They got on with such speed and success as a
people, owing to their laws, that they far outrivaled the tribes they
lived among, and have, in fact, outrivaled ever since most of the
nations into which they have scattered, in their tough, isolated, and
organic manner. Their success is the measure of our anti-Semitism. The
Jews also, though inadvertently, gave us a still better God than their
own. Perhaps they might eventually have accepted Jesus Christ for
themselves, but for their vindictive streak happening to combine with a
streak of civil servant appeasement in Pontius Pilate which led to the
crucifixion. Still, I have never seen why their descendants should be
blamed for the crucifixion any more than we blame modern Frenchmen for
having handed Joan of Arc over to us to burn. The responsibility of both
crimes was mutually divided, and even the crimes spread the power of
their victims. A good deal of this island is actively Christian today,
because of the Free Churches, especially the Baptists, which stood up
for the slaves against their masters. The only official church, the
Anglican, supported slavery; it would not allow the slaves inside their
church and refused them marriage.”

“How very horrible!” exclaimed Lucy. “And how miserable for our poor
Bishop now!”

Philip laughed. “It was thought most estimable by your government less
than a hundred years ago,” he told her. “Well, to go back to Obeah.
Slaves don’t want to be better than they are, they want to be stronger.
Any form of goodness or morality implies choice, and the essence of
being a slave is to be deprived of choice. Slaves got beaten up for
choosing. A bad power was essential to them, in order to overcome the
evil power of their masters. Sick with bitterness (even after a hundred
years some of us are still sick with it!), these tortured outcasts
invented Obeah. In Obeah West Indians possess a god who is wholly evil,
and when they wish to do anyone harm, they get his support and so feel
inspired and strengthened to carry out their crimes—just as Christians
or Jews feel inspired by their God to carry out decent and friendly
activities.”

Lucy listened intently; it was the first time Philip had ever really let
her see what he thought. He was reluctant to do so now. He moved
impatiently from time to time as he spoke, tossing back his head in
disgust, as if he were a spirited horse feeling a bit in its mouth.

“It must make it hard to be a Christian here,” Lucy murmured. “Where do
they practice this Obeah?”

“There is a hill on the opposite side of this mountain—you can look
down on it from the ridge—called the Hill of Silence,” Philip answered.
“I believe people who live on that hill practice it. It is, of course, a
secret practice, but Obeah addicts might be found anywhere on the
Island. Anyone wishing to practice it must simply go out at night and
cut down a cotton tree, then the spirit of this tree is supposed to
enter into him, in order to help him commit his crime or series of
crimes. I always suppose Nazis and Communists act from the same
instinct. They give up their individual responsibility in order to gain
more power to get what they want, by identifying themselves with a
dictator. The dictator acts as a silk-cotton tree. Freedom is a small
price for some people to pay in order to obtain power.”

“But who at Everslade could want such power against me?” Lucy asked.

“You must ask yourself whose interest it is to get rid of you,” Philip
suggested. “Had you been killed the other day—before the Christmas
holidays—those two girls who went to the roadhouse need not have left
the school.”

“Oh!” Lucy cried. “Oh—but that’s impossible!” Philip said nothing. He
knew that now she was aware of her danger it would be easier to get her
to take precautions; but he saw that she could not yet envisage the
chief precaution because she did not suspect Elvira.

“Elvira is my greatest friend. She was heartbroken over my accident,”
Lucy said, finally looking out into the fugitive last light with
darkened eyes. “It is unthinkable.”

“You must know better than I,” Philip said cautiously, “how truly she is
your friend, but even if she is, she might quite innocently be the cause
of Obeah being used against you. No doubt Elvira has passionately
disappointed friends among the children, the teachers, and the servants.
Perhaps one of them may be responsible for your—accident.”

Lucy was silent for a moment, then she said tentatively, “Elvira is
frightened for me too, but she believes that Myra O’San is an abnormal
child and she thinks Miss Ho Sung is not at all really friendly to me.
She says Miss Ho Sung was more likely to have been chosen as
headmistress than she was, because Miss Ho Sung has higher academic
distinctions.”

The face looking across the little room at Lucy from the shadows might
have been carved from black ironstone. “And do you think,” Philip asked
her in his low, resonant voice, “that Myra O’San is a delinquent child,
or suppose that a Chinese lady of high distinction and reliability is
likely to practice a savage cult?”

“It seems to me as absurd and unthinkable as to suspect Elvira!” Lucy
said quickly. “I love Myra—I would not be alive except for Whiteleaf Ho
Sung! I only tell you this because you come from outside and
because—because I trust you. I want you to know everything, and then to
tell me what is the best thing for me to do. I don’t want to be murdered
but I don’t want to give up the school either. I suppose when you said
just now that I should be safe not only _with_ the Anstruthers, but _by_
being with them, what you really meant was that I’d be safe if the
person who wants to get rid of me thought I was going to marry Bob!
Well, I don’t want to marry Bob either!” Philip took two strides across
the little room, and stood opposite Lucy. His voice when he spoke was
mocking, but it was a friendly mockery, and the eyes looking down at her
smiled. “You have overlooked one highly likely suspect!” Philip told
her. “I was up here on Sunday night. I was here before you got home. Why
did I not saw through the balcony—lurk in the shadows and give you a
little push? A ferocious black man, the acknowledged friend of Miss Ho
Sung, a determined anti-Britisher? In America they would lynch me with
ecstatic certainty and feel no shadow of a doubt that I was guilty. I
simply can’t think why you should suppose me worthy of the slightest
confidence.”

Lucy looked up at Philip. His eyes laughing down at her flickered and
looked away. Perhaps he did not want to see the depth of the trust that
filled Lucy’s eyes.

“You are too proud to do me any harm,” Lucy said slowly. “You might want
to hurt people stronger than yourself, never weaker ones. Besides, I
knew—when I woke up—after my fall—that you wanted to help me.”

“Doctors do usually want to help their patients,” Philip admitted. “It
is true that I do not wish either to harm you or that harm should come
to you—that is why I have given you the best advice in my power. In
spite of what you have told me, I want you to visit the Anstruthers now.
It gives us more time, for one thing—Whiteleaf Ho Sung, Myra, and
me—to think out how best to protect you, and as I suggested, and as you
supposed, your being there would give rise to the idea that you might
marry Anstruther. No one commits a murder if he can get what he wants
without it.”

“Well, I’ll go,” said Lucy reluctantly. “I’ll do what you tell
me—though from my point of view it’s a mistake to do it, and hardly
fair to Bob.”

Philip smiled down at her. “You can always make it fair to him,” he
suggested. “Use the arm a little every day, not too much at a time, wear
dark glasses in the sun and don’t read much.”

He was gone before Lucy could make him say good-by to her, and he
appeared not to have seen her outstretched hand.




                            _CHAPTER XVIII_


A gentle knock sounded and Whiteleaf Ho Sung drifted into the darkening
room. She seemed hardly to have crossed the floor before she was
standing by Lucy’s bed, looking down at her with those inscrutable
slanting eyes. A piece of dandelion fluff could not have moved more
lightly through the air.

“I came,” Whiteleaf said, “to see if there was anything you wanted
before I went to bed—a book—a watch to wind? With one hand such things
are awkward to arrange sometimes.”

“You are so kind to me,” Lucy said gratefully, “that I never seem to
have any wants, but do sit down and talk to me for a little. Dr. Calgary
wishes me to visit the Anstruthers for a week on Tuesday before term
begins, did you know that?”

Whiteleaf’s delicately arched brows moved a little higher. “That is very
far from here, is it not?” she asked politely. “You pass through the
Cock Pit country, I believe, where the men who were once Spanish slaves
refused to become English ones. I have been told the British sent five
hundred bloodhounds to chase them out of it, but were not wholly
successful. The Cock Pit country is very secretive and the British very
wisely left these fierce, ignorant people to govern themselves.”
Whiteleaf sat down, not near Lucy but by the open window letting in the
night.

“How very horrible,” Lucy murmured. “This poor island—what a cruel
history it has had!”

“Yes,” Whiteleaf tranquilly agreed, “and people who are afraid become
fierce, too. Have you ever noticed that furious dogs hang their tails
while contented dogs lift them? So I think it is with men. They become
fierce when they are unhappy. Since the Maroons escaped a second slavery
one might say that to be fierce is an advantage; yet I am told that the
poor Cock Pit people are today the most degraded and wretched
inhabitants of this island, so perhaps their freedom was not such an
advantage to them after all. Or else to be isolated from your brothers
is an even greater disadvantage than to be a slave.”

“You’re so much cleverer than I am,” Lucy said a little ruefully. “You
think about so many things and people you don’t know—whereas I only
think about people I _do_ know, and not always very intelligently even
about them.”

“It is less easy to think intelligently about those we know,” Whiteleaf
answered courteously. “Other factors enter into these personal
problems—emotion, for instance.”

“I was puzzling myself as you came in,” Lucy went on after a pause,
“about a human problem, not _quite_ a personal problem,” she added
hastily.

“This problem,” Whiteleaf asked lightly, “you really wish to speak of
it, or you would like to be interrupted so as not to have to think about
it—which?”

“A little of both,” Lucy confessed laughingly. “But now I have begun, I
think I would really rather speak of it. I was wondering if what people
say is true; do men and women always know when they attract each other?
And if they do, can they stop it? And does it greatly matter whether it
is stopped or not? This visit might bring out these problems for me, and
I should like to have some kind of a plan to meet them.”

“But those are three problems, not one,” Whiteleaf objected. “Shall we
begin with the first? You speak of men and women as if they were a
different species—yet both are human, and when it comes to emotion, I
find they meet it in very much the same way. Shall we then say, ‘Do
human beings know whether they attract each other or not?’ If your
medicine is nasty that Dr. Calgary gives you, can you tell if you like
it or not?”

“Oh, well!” Lucy admitted. “Certainly I can. But can I stop liking or
disliking the medicine at will? Besides, in making a new friendship,
isn’t it rather important to know beforehand how far one wants such a
friendship to go?”

“Now,” thought Lucy triumphantly, “she will think I mean Bob, or perhaps
Elvira, not Philip.”

When Whiteleaf answered her, her voice sounded much more serious than
Lucy’s. “Does one ever _make_ a friendship? I think that one discovers
friendship rather than makes it. Attraction is there in the persons
themselves, not only in what we bring to them—we have to find as well
as bring, and perhaps one cannot always know what is to be found until
time shows us, but it is within one’s power to stop entering too far
into any relationship. There is no question that it is within our power
to stop.”

“But why should people stop being attractive?” Lucy persisted. “Suppose
you do like a friendship? Suppose you like your medicine and think it
does you good? Why should you stop taking it?”

“But we are not really talking of medicine,” Whiteleaf objected.
“Medicine is an image we have used in order to show that taste is given
us to decide what we like. And we have decided that there is no doubt
about this taste—we do have it. We know when we are attracted, and now
we come to something quite different which we are unable to explain by
an analogy, because there is always a lie somewhere in every analogy.
Attraction between men and women is a natural instinct, so is the
instinct of self-preservation. Both are therefore in a sense right,
since they are natural, yet I can imagine occasions when it would be
right to disobey them. People die for their friends, and they are
sometimes true to them against the drive of their passions.”

“You mean,” Lucy said diffidently, “if other people were to suffer
because of our following our instincts, we should not follow them?”

“Yes, that is what I mean,” Whiteleaf agreed. “If we are in any way
different from animals, this is where we differ. Their instincts are
always right—they are safe to follow them. We are not—the power has
been given us to choose.”

She got up decisively, as if such a choice was in her own mind and she
had already made it. Lucy was reminded of how Philip had gone to the
door and then looked back at her with that hurt look in his eyes, but it
was too dark for Lucy to see the expression in Whiteleaf’s eyes. She was
only conscious that Whiteleaf got up decisively and yet lingered a
little by the open door. “I believe you Europeans have a saying that the
night brings counsel,” Whiteleaf remarked, before she left the room. “We
Chinese have quite the opposite saying. We say, ‘The day brings
counsel.’ We expect to see the things that were obscure to us in
darkness more clearly in the light.”




                             _CHAPTER XIX_


A vivid and startling figure in the retreating light, Elvira flitted
along the terrace in a scarlet dirndl. Lucy, standing by her open
window, saw her with a sinking heart. She did not want to talk any more.
Her arm felt curiously vulnerable and heavy, freed from its plaster
cast, and every finger tingled and ached as if it were solely
responsible for her broken limb.

“I shall get into bed before she comes,” Lucy said to herself hurriedly,
but this was difficult, for it required a new kind of balance. She had
only just succeeded, and was lying back, exhausted, against the pillow,
when Elvira in the gathering dusk, like a panther leaping from an
invisible tree, sprang through the window.

“Dearest,” she exclaimed, “how wonderful to see you free from that stiff
plaster! How wonderful to see you at all. I thought Philip Calgary would
never go.” Elvira embraced Lucy, retook, as it were, with her avid eyes
and pliant hands, possession of her, and then moved to and fro about the
room, with short, swift strides, taking in with every step every thought
that might be straying in its quiet emptiness, as if her mind were a
giant vacuum cleaner, powerfully sucking up each particle of emotion or
expression which might desire to escape.

Elvira checked herself at last, and standing at the foot of Lucy’s bed,
she said with pathetic force: “I saw the girls off today—Petronella and
Angela. I took them to the gate. They live near together at St. George’s
and their parents had sent a car to take them both home together. Nobody
else knew that they were never to come back. You know the two young
larches by the gate? They look sent out by us toward the forest. I
felt—in the sunset light—they might have been images of those poor
girls—denuded of their leaves and shivering into the wild darkness of
the forest. I know we did right. I keep saying to myself even while they
cried and I cried, ‘They must go—they _can_ make a new life!’ But can
they? Their plumage gone—their pride and their dignity shaken—their
parents waiting for them without pleasure—to make new plans for
them—without hope! Don’t think I dispute your decision, Lucy, but what
I wept for, what makes me feel hideously guilty and restless still, is
why I couldn’t have influenced them _enough_, couldn’t have made such a
disaster impossible.”

“Yes,” Lucy agreed, “I feel that too. We ought to have foreseen they
_must_ break out, and have given them some more normal vent. But it’s
not easy to control other people or guess their sense of values. I feel
more inexperienced, too, than I used to feel in England because I don’t
know the forces on this Island. I don’t know what kind of homes the
girls come from or where they are going to. You must tell me more,
Elvira. Don’t let me run blind against danger signals I don’t
understand.” Elvira sank on the bed beside Lucy. “Your voice shakes,”
she said. “They let you sit up too long. You’d be far better off with
us, with most of the children off for the holidays and Nancy and me to
take care of you. Why not come back tomorrow?”

“I must stay here till Tuesday,” Lucy explained, “and then—then Dr.
Calgary wants me to go—for a whole week—to the Anstruthers’—I don’t
even want to go _now_ but I suppose I _must_.”

“But it’s crazy!” Elvira exclaimed, “simply crazy—you aren’t a bit fit
to look after yourself—you _must_ come home and rest first!”

Lucy turned on her reading lamp so that she could see Elvira’s face more
plainly, and less, she felt, dangerously.

“Perhaps Dr. Calgary is right,” she said slowly. “It’ll buck me up to
make an effort. He wants me to use my arm all the time now. You see, he
knows what I care about most is to be fit for my job.”

Elvira was silent for a little, she played with Lucy’s free hand. She
stooped across to her bed table and rearranged a bowl of mountain
flowers, then she fixed her dark, glowing eyes on Lucy’s face. “I’m
going to be horribly indiscreet,” she said at last. “Why _have_ they
made all this fuss against your seeing people, even me—and then
suddenly when you can hardly stand on your feet, they rush you off to
pay a visit among strangers? Let me phone Dr. Lemon and get him to take
over your case. He’s a first rate doctor, a member of our committee—he
ought to have seen you from the first. He’s safe. I don’t believe you
are fit to go tomorrow. It’s a terribly long drive over rough roads to
Free Waters. I honestly think that for some reason—perhaps not a
healthy reason—Philip Calgary’s trying to hurry you away from here.”

“What other reason could he have?” Lucy objected.

“He _might_ have many other reasons,” Elvira said mysteriously. “One of
them might be that he finds you too attractive.”

“No,” said Lucy promptly, too promptly, she immediately realized, to
convince another woman. “Of course not,” she added rather crossly, “why
should he? I sometimes think we make rather a fuss about white girls’
looks, Elvira. Are we really as seductive as we think we are? Aren’t we
rather like bleached linen hung on sticks, compared with these lithe,
bright blackberries of girls I’ve seen on the Island, moving like
flowers in the wind? I can’t help thinking if I were a West Indian and
used to my own women, I should hardly cast a glance at white ones.”

“You say that,” Elvira retorted bitterly, “because you can afford to. If
you _were_ one of us you’d know there’s an even greater attraction in
white people than their physical one. There’s the tremendous prestige
attraction of being white.”

“I don’t think Dr. Calgary thinks there’s much prestige attached to the
white race,” Lucy said slowly, “none that we _deserve_ anyhow.”

Elvira’s face closed in upon itself. She wished to do her thinking about
Philip Calgary alone. “He knows what other people think,” she said at
last. “His pride is just a smokescreen to hide his pain. You’ve been
awfully nice to him, Lucy, nicer perhaps than any white girl on the
Island has ever been to him before. You’ve talked and laughed with him
as if there were no barrier between you. But there is a barrier, Lucy.
Don’t be surprised if he realizes that there is, and takes his
precautions. Honestly, I think you’d be acting more fairly—even to
him—if you had Dr. Lemon instead—and perhaps more fairly as well as
more _safely_, if you _insisted_ on leaving the annex and coming back to
us tomorrow.”

Lucy withdrew her hand from Elvira’s pliant fingers. “Oh, dear, how
tiresome!” she said, in order to give herself time to think. “Actually,”
she said lightly, “doctors are quite different from other men. Dr.
Calgary thinks about me as a fractured skull and a broken arm. I hardly
ever see him without Whiteleaf and then they’re both amusing themselves
with knitting needles and hot water. Besides, you can’t have it both
ways—if he _were_ attracted by me, he wouldn’t hurry me into this
‘quickie’ visit to Free Waters. To tell you the truth, I didn’t
particularly want to go there just yet, but if he thinks it’ll do me
good, I’m prepared to accept his word for it.”

“Yes, but _why_ are you prepared to accept his word for it?” Elvira
demanded with a penetrating look that pierced Lucy’s vague innocence as
a searchlight thrusts through a fog.

“Why do you accept his word rather than mine, for instance, and against
your own common sense?”

“Well,” Lucy answered with determined lightness, “I suppose because he’s
a doctor and you and I are not. As for his thinking too much about me,
what becomes of your theory that his life’s bound up with Whiteleaf’s?”

“That’s just it,” Elvira said with increasing gravity. “You’re playing
about, my dear, with forces you don’t understand. He _is_ bound up with
Whiteleaf. If you try to pull him away you’ll have her to reckon with.
Perhaps you already _have_ had her to reckon with. And yet you insist on
staying in their power, and in her hands. Have you forgotten that she
often cooks what you eat?”

“Oh, don’t!” Lucy cried in sudden exasperation. “Don’t, Elvira! You’ve
hinted before you don’t trust her. I don’t say she likes me, I don’t
think she does, but she just isn’t _like_ that. She’d save my life at
the risk of her own and not like me a bit the better for having saved
it. I’m perfectly safe here, and it isn’t that—being safe, I mean—that
matters most.”

“Then what _does_ matter most? What do you suppose I’m most frightened
about—_except_ danger to you?” Elvira demanded violently, her nostrils
expanding and contracting. “Is it me you distrust?”

Lucy controlled herself with an effort. When at last she answered she
spoke quietly. “It’s being true,” she said, “that I think matters most,
and it wouldn’t be true to distrust where you have every reason to
trust. If people have nursed and cured you, you must accept their
medical advice, and as for you, Elvira, we’re friends, we simply _can’t_
afford to distrust each other!”

Elvira’s hand slipped over Lucy’s again. “I see,” she said softly, “I
see—well, that’s for me the _main_ thing—that the confidence between
us is perfect. And as far as I’m concerned it shall always remain so.
Only don’t forget what I’ve said to you. Don’t let them fool you—don’t
fool yourself. Asiatics don’t think or act as we do. And as for Philip
Calgary, I knew him well when he was a boy, and people don’t change
much, fundamentally. He was a passionate, susceptible, rather vindictive
boy. Don’t rouse passions in either of them you don’t intend to
satisfy.”

“Oh, dear,” said Lucy. “Passions—you use words like gongs and I _have_
such a headache, Elvira. Before you go—I’d forgotten to ask you—what’s
become of Margorie Fielding? Is she off for the holidays?”

Elvira got up from the bed and went to the open window. Night had
blotted out everything except the stars. They hung so far from the earth
that they seemed to have separated themselves even from the darkness and
to be on the other side of it, balancing on some invisible pathway of
their own.

“Margorie,” Elvira said without turning around, “is still with us—the
Brigadier has been sent for to attend a conference on one of the other
islands.” She stepped outside the window, and saying that she would come
again tomorrow to see Lucy, disappeared.

The pleasant darkness settled around Lucy. She turned out her lamp and
rested in it. She could think now quietly over her various problems. Was
she in any real danger? And from whom? What were Philip’s feelings
toward her? He had made no advances. He had been reassuring and kind
when she was in pain but always on his guard against a personal
relationship. There had been, however, moments when naturalness had
broken through and they found it a relief to be in each other’s company.
This curious, unacknowledged sense of relief came rarely, and neither of
them had taken any advantage of it. It was more frequent when Whiteleaf
was with them than when they were alone. Not until today, when Philip
turned and looked at her with that hurt look in his eyes, had Lucy
realized there was an actual relationship between them. Ought she, dare
she, take the pain in Philip’s eyes lightly? She knew that by letting
her see his pain he had made an appeal to her and she felt ashamed of
leaving his appeal unanswered. She knew what she owed him. Out of her
acute pain she had seen Philip’s dark clear-cut face as Andromeda must
have seen the face of Perseus, while she was chained to her rock and
within reach of the dragon.

From wherever her danger came, Lucy knew that Philip was her deliverer.
What was it he had said to her once—or was it what she herself had said
to the English girl Margorie, when she was trying to release the child’s
stubborn spirit and get at the truth? “Men are not only responsible for
their acts, they are responsible for the consequences of their acts.”
Was she then responsible not only for attracting Philip but for all that
might happen from it, to Philip, to Whiteleaf, to herself?

If she was, then it became a very important thing to go to Free Waters.




                              _CHAPTER XX_


The terrace was full of laughter and sunshine. Little dark girls crowded
around Bob and his car, and piled flower offerings into Lucy’s lap.

Elvira smiled a farewell that was infinitely reassuring and
affectionate, as if in letting Lucy go she was at the same time
welcoming her back. Lucy had a curious feeling that she was being
carried away by a force that would never let her return. She glanced at
Bob’s profile; he had stopped smiling, but she saw that he was deeply
pleased, not only because she _was_ beside him, but because he was
taking her away from all the things that made her want to stay.

Lucy was not in the least in love with Bob, yet she was deeply conscious
of the fundamental tie between them—they knew more about life together
than they would either of them ever know apart. Lucy knew why his eyes
were homesick till they met hers, and she knew that she wanted to cure
his homesickness.

They plunged down the mountainside, through moist rich ravines, till
they came to a turning that took them toward the Gap. On the other side
of the pass the country changed completely. They found themselves gazing
down into a deep, wide valley beyond which lay a barren land, peppered
all over with minute tulip-shaped peaks. These strange hillocks were
covered with short, tinder-dry undergrowth, like russet fur, and it was
impossible to distinguish one peak from the other. When Lucy counted a
group of six she was suddenly aware that there were seven, and where she
had a moment before counted seven, there appeared to be only six. Black
cliffs covered with disheveled undergrowth and hollowed by deep caves
rose up out of nothingness into the curious landscape. “Hunters’ caves,”
Bob told her.

This was the Maroon country where the Spanish slaves who had
precipitately lost their masters took refuge and stubbornly refused to
serve the triumphant British. There was no further need for hiding and
yet the few people that passed them on the narrow dusty road still
looked secretive and belligerent. The valley beneath them opened out
toward an empty, sunny land. Directly opposite them a round green hill
sloped downward, licking at the valley floor like a long green tongue.

“What an odd-looking hill,” Lucy exclaimed.

“They call it,” Bob told her, “the Hill of Silence. Birds won’t sing on
it. Obeah people live there.”

“But you can’t see any houses,” Lucy objected.

“They live in huts tucked away in the folds of the hill,” Bob explained.
“If you can call them people—or if you can call it life. It’s a rum
creed and a rum place—best steered clear of.” He drew up the car,
facing toward the vast, sunny emptiness where forgotten “Great People”
had once lived their rich and ample lives and where their dead houses
slowly melted into sunlight.

The slaves who had worked to make these enormous fortunes were gone too,
but perhaps their heartbreaks and desires, perhaps their suppressed
ferocities, still lingered on the Hill of Silence.

“It’s funny that it’s so green,” Lucy said, “and all the rest of the
landscape, red earth and sunburned undergrowth, has a dead look. It is
as if something or other _kept_ that one hill alive.”

“There’s a lot of funny things on this island,” Bob answered Lucy as he
took out the lunch his mother had sent for them, “and it’s a damned
sight better to let their funniness alone.”

Far away across innumerable soft brown roofs Lucy’s eyes sought the blue
liveliness of the sea. The air blew sweet and hard across the ridge.
There was no one to be seen, and no sound but the faint sighing of the
wind broke the serene stillness. They might have been cast away on a
desert island if it had not been for the quality of the lunch that they
proceeded to eat.

“Now,” Bob said, when it was finished, “I’ve been waiting to hear you
tell me, but you don’t seem very forthcoming about it—who pushed you
off that balcony?”

Lucy met his eyes and looked away again. “I don’t know,” she said at
last, slowly, “and I’ve got to a place in my mind where I don’t seem
awfully to _want_ to know. I know who was in the dining room at the time
and it couldn’t have been any of them—that’s a great relief. There
were, of course, at least a dozen children out with their parents for
the Sunday who might have come in without anyone knowing. The annex
people don’t come to our supper and so were equally unaccounted for.
Besides, there is the whole Island to choose from. I sometimes think it
was one of the men who were at that roadhouse and resented our taking
off the girls—but I also sometimes think I just fell, because I didn’t
move back in time.”

Bob’s eyes ran over her slight, well-balanced figure. “Could be,” he
admitted, “but not likely. You and I, my girl, have had a bit of
training in when to move quick. What about the annex, what about the
Chinese lady, and that girl that tags round after her looking like a
water buffalo? I have heard they’re rather mixed up with a man I don’t
like. Calgary hates the British like poison and stands in with that
fellow Ransom, who’s a Red and wants to run the Island.”

Lucy listened to this description of Philip with restrained annoyance.
It was on the tip of her tongue to say, “Why don’t you like him?” but on
the whole she decided to leave the subject of Philip alone. “It’s
unthinkable it was the annex people,” she said. “Of course I can’t make
Whiteleaf Ho Sung out. For three weeks she’s been nursing me like an
inspired angel. I think she and Myra saved my life between them.
Certainly if they’d wanted to take it they’ve had every opportunity. I’m
quite sure of Myra. She may look like a water buffalo, but she has a
heart and mind that would be hard to match in any country. I like her
more and think there is more in her than any girl in the school. But I
often wonder why I never get to know Whiteleaf any better. You’d think
seeing her half a dozen times a day all these weeks and having her do
everything one person _can_ do for anyone helpless, that I _should_ have
got to know her, but I haven’t. We’ve talked a lot, but what she says,
and she’s awfully clever, sort of hangs in the air. It isn’t a part of
what I believe she _is_. I don’t know how to explain but it’s like being
spoken to from a long way off through a mechanical instrument. Yet this
morning she gave me a beautiful present. She brought me in my breakfast
herself and on my tray there was a little porcelain bowl—very thin and
of a lovely texture—the most beautiful blue. She said, ‘This is my rice
bowl—my mother gave us each one when we were very small children. It
occurred to me the other day that it matched your eyes. I hope you will
receive it from me as a memento of your recovery.’ I was simply terribly
grateful and touched, but before I could thank her properly she was
gone. I didn’t see her again till she waved from the balcony just now,
and I _still_ don’t seem to know her any better.”

“They say here on the Island that she’s that black fellow Calgary’s
mistress—and they generally know,” Bob said grudgingly, without looking
at Lucy. “Chinese are awfully difficult to understand, but from what you
say it isn’t likely to be her or the girl. I’m up against it Lucy, but
I’ve got to know—I can’t, I simply _can’t_ let you go back into that
damned old creepy place where there is a killer.”

“But we don’t know that there _is_,” Lucy expostulated. “The only people
who had a grudge against me were at supper—the people who weren’t at
supper had no grudge. I more and more think it was an accident, and if
it wasn’t an accident, there was such a shindy made about it that I
don’t think there’ll be another accident. Mr. Myers and Dr. Lemon came
up and poked into everything, let alone an astonishing visit from the
A.D.C. from King’s House with a bunch of grapes. I have a corner room
and Nancy Peck sleeps next door. She could tackle a boa constrictor, of
course my balcony’s mended, and I promised—” Lucy brought herself up
short. She had very nearly said, “I promised Philip—” “I promised,” she
amended, “to lock my door at night. It’s a pretty high balcony and no
one could climb up it. If anyone brought a ladder I should hear it. I
generally sleep on the balcony itself.”

She saw that there was something more Bob wanted to say, but he didn’t
say it. He moved his hand and closed it over hers. Lucy’s hand lay in
his, as unresponsive as a piece of wood. She neither withdrew it nor
returned his pressure. She thought, “Why does it never matter to me
now—the touch of a man’s hand—when it used to mean so much?” and
suddenly the tears came to her eyes and she said, “Oh, Bob—I can’t—it
isn’t as long ago as I thought.” He dropped her hand quickly and turned
the car back on to the road. But had she been quite honest, Lucy asked
herself. Was it because it wasn’t so long ago or because it was longer;
and that for the first time the old desire had come back to her again,
to share the quickening of her blood and her life, but not with Bob?

“We are coming to the country now,” Bob told her. “See how green it is
all getting, and like an English park. We’re rather proud of the fact
that we can’t even see the sea from our house.”

High on the airy green uplands, the great house of Free Waters rose like
a huge white owl, its wings jutting out on either side, its beak
outstretched as if to seize its prey. Never before had Lucy felt the
vague panic which now invaded her. Nor was the feeling dispelled by Judy
Anstruther on the veranda steps, both hands held out in greeting. When
Bob lifted Lucy with infinite care, as if she were some priceless china
vase, out of the car, and handed her over to his mother, the sense of
spiritual danger only grew more acute. Yet here if anywhere Lucy was
safe, here if anywhere she was at home. She could not give a name to
what she was afraid of losing, yet she felt it was all she had, and that
at any moment she might lose it.




                             _CHAPTER XXI_


The day nightingales woke Lucy at dawn. From her window she could see
the big creamy birds with sepia brown wings splash through the pale
light, across the dew-drenched lawns.

Their song was longer and sweeter than a thrush’s song, and did not
close in a chuckle, but melted into the fragrant air.

Great white Indian cattle with passive, tragic jaws above massive folds
of chin, hanging like bibs, strolled in alien grandeur under the shadowy
trees. Cocks crowed in an outlandish familiarity, and hens bustled
through their morning miracles as if determined to remind Lucy that this
island, too, was part of the British Empire.

Lizards began to move tentatively into strips of sunlight and invisible
haunting doves moaned their perpetual melancholy, jeered at by
mockingbirds, who could copy in a rough cartoon fashion any bird that
they fancied putting out of countenance. Somewhere, to the accompaniment
of low voices and giggles, breakfast was being prepared, and Lucy could
smell bacon and coffee blending with the morning breeze. It was into the
British Empire that she stepped an hour later, when she went down to the
veranda at breakfast time and found her hostess awaiting her.

Judy Anstruther had never been pretty, but she had managed every other
attraction. Lucy thought she had never seen a middle-aged woman, who
made no bones about being middle-aged, present so happy an appearance.
Neat as a water wagtail, the best groomed of birds, and gay as a morning
glory, Judy’s color was firm, her eyes bright, and every glossy hair was
in its place.

“I thought only American women could dress as you do,” Lucy told her,
laughing. “As if they’d made their clothes overnight every time they put
them on.”

“Perhaps I have an eye,” Judy explained smilingly, “but I have a skilled
dressmaker too, and we both put our minds to it. ‘Know what you are, and
hide it!’ has been my motto since I was a girl. I’m glad you can wear
pink in the morning. Bob will begin to enjoy himself at last. He’s been
crazy to have you here, and now he’s crazy that you _are_ here. He seems
to think the whole Island’s in a conspiracy to destroy you.”

“I do feel extraordinarily safe here,” Lucy was beginning to say, when
she found that her voice shook and she stopped speaking. Physically
safe—that was what the sudden change in her whole feeling was—safe as
a child feels who has lost itself in a vast railway station full of
unknown people, and who suddenly sees in the distance the one figure who
embodies all security, his mother, advancing toward him. More safety
still came up the veranda steps in the shape of Bob’s father, a slow,
heavy, kindly man, persistently encircled by two golden setters, each
equally determined to claim his entire attention. Tom’s gray eyes slid
over Lucy in casual benevolence, as if she were just another item in an
always rather overcrowded house, none of which, except for short
intervals, had much to do with him. He seemed to carry the farm with him
in his loose tweed coat. His hair was thick and colorless with sun, and
he held easily, but with care, what at first appeared to be a ball of
golden silk in one large hand, but which turned out to be a setter puppy
of a few weeks old. He liked Lucy, and by depositing the puppy slowly
and with great care on her lap, and smiling down at her, he expressed
all that he felt about her accident. From a French window Bob’s brother,
Bill, with his new Canadian wife, approached them, hand in hand. Bill
and Daisy were a little bewildered by their new happiness, but as
everybody around them took it for granted, they too tried to pretend
that they hadn’t noticed it. Bill was more solid than Bob, and more like
his father. His eyes held the same desultory kindliness. Daisy was a
nice, healthy-looking girl, and since Bill was convinced that Helen and
Cleopatra had had nothing Daisy didn’t have, she became, when Bill’s
eyes rested upon her, as lovely as he made her feel. Bob came down last
and paid Lucy the least obvious attention. What he wanted most of all
was not to let anybody know that this morning he liked everything better
than usual. He therefore kept a stern poker face and ate his breakfast
with selective austerity. In spite of the fact that he hit back with
gibes at anybody who said anything to him, Bob seemed rather to add to
his mother’s gaiety than to subtract from it. Bill was full of jokes and
what he couldn’t hide of his joy in his new wife he put into pummeling
and distracting the otherwise well-behaved setters. The whole family
went out of their way, without ostentation, to be nice to Lucy.

She was Bob’s cup of tea. She couldn’t make any mistakes with them as
long as she was prepared to _be_ Bob’s cup of tea. The only mistake she
could make would be not to be, and that mistake, Lucy realized, would be
fatal. Slowly their pleasant, hard-working, good-humored world expanded
around Lucy. Because of her arm she was debarred from the more strenuous
of their activities. She couldn’t play tennis or swim, so she must be
taken to the races; dinners and cocktail parties, followed by bridge,
were devised daily for her.

Lucy knew without having the least pressure brought to bear upon her
that she was the center of every occasion. Once more she was with those
of her own kind and generation, a war heroine decorated for unknown,
incredible deeds in dire emergencies, by their own king, and even here,
on this Island, once more (though inadvertently this time) exposed to
mysterious dangers. No one bothered Lucy about what had happened to her
at Everslade, they only more and more deeply accepted her, while to be
one of themselves seemed, even to Lucy, to be a law of her being. Judy
took her to lunch at King’s House and when the day’s work was over
Admiral Bumpus from her committee and the Brigadier from the Gap came to
dinner at Free Waters and gave Lucy their deep, unspoken approval. It
was in their eyes when they looked at her, and in their quiet voices.
They liked Lucy all the more when they found she was reticent about her
adventures. They thought her a modest, unassuming girl of the old
Victorian type, only considerably more active and useful.

Lucy’s contemporaries would have preferred someone more glamorous and
rather noisier than Lucy, a girl who would drink a good deal and be more
like themselves. They vaguely suspected her of being a highbrow even
when her arm wasn’t in a sling. Bob, however, was satisfied with the
place she took in his circle. She was nice to all his friends, and he
didn’t want his girl to be too nice. Let her be respected by the old and
envied by the young and that would be enough for him. He saw that the
men thought him a lucky fellow and that the girls realized that Lucy
could rival them, though she didn’t try. Lucy didn’t snub them, she even
seemed to want to be as nice to the girls as she was to the men, and
this made the girls feel a little suspicious of her, though not
precisely hostile.

They had no idea that Lucy judged them by another set of values
altogether and judged them very kindly. These girls, Lucy thought, would
come up in a crisis—cigarettes, laughter, lipstick, and all—just as
those other girls she had trained in England had come up to face bombs
falling, their nerves beneath the surface, sound through flames. Yet
Lucy was a little sorry that now there were no bombs falling these
island girls had let all responsibilities other than those of their own
amusements fall away from them. They didn’t think, they didn’t read,
they barely listened to the world news on the radio. They prepared
themselves in no way to meet the insecurity in which their island and
their whole world moved. They let acute poverty, the malnutrition of
children, the fearful sufferings and angry bitterness of the population,
slide off them like water off a duck’s back. Political problems were not
in their outfit. Only games, men, drink, and clothes roused their
vigorous consciousness. Lucy was so used to the men of her own race that
not until Everslade had blotted them out of her immediate existence had
she really noticed them. Suddenly she saw them with extraordinary
vividness—a little unimaginative, a little slow, they had yet reached a
point in civilization where, though it often took a prod of violent
circumstance to reach it, a piece of conscience could always be counted
on, as if it were part of their anatomy. The war wasn’t over for them in
quite the same way as it was over for these girls. Many of them had left
their war responsibilities to return to heavier civilian ones. Whether
they liked it or not, the problems of the Island attracted their
attention, but they were accustomed to think in terms of enemies, and it
struck Lucy as a little unfortunate that they continued to regard their
problems with the same practiced hostility.

Bob and Lucy were not spontaneously alone together for several days. It
was as if Bob had purposely stood aside in order to say to Lucy, “Get to
know my life; judge me by that before you make up your mind about the
future with me. After all, I’m its product; this is my family; all these
people who surge over from the nearest camp or their own plantations to
play tennis, drink our drinks, and share our meals are our friends and
want to be yours. It is what I’ve got to give you, and it’s all I’ve
got.”

But while he stood aside to make his purpose plain, Lucy was saying to
herself with increasing urgency, “I want just to be free to enjoy myself
with my own people, to feel this intense security, without having to
take Bob or any of the rest of them too seriously for granted.”

Lucy was excused from church on Sunday because of her still frequent
headaches, and after everybody else had streamed off in cars, Bob
strolled from an open window and dropped on the veranda steps at her
feet.

“There’s not a soul in the house and they won’t be back for hours,” he
informed Lucy. “Take a cigarette and tell me what you think of us all.
You’ve had it. Bags of bodies. That’s our little lot. What do you make
of us, Lucy?”

Lucy hesitated. This was her hour of reckoning, the hour that Philip
Calgary, in the face of her extreme reluctance, had forced upon her. Her
visit had already done her good. She was rested, her nerves were quiet;
and now she had to pay for it.

“You know I love your mother,” she said hesitantly. “She isn’t like mine
and yet she makes me think of her. I suppose she’s just a bit, the
nicest bit there is, of all mothers. She’s generous—she’s behind
you—she’s so funny and kind—and a beautiful fit all round. I think
you’ve a terribly nice family. Bob, but of course you’ve seen I like
them—I couldn’t _not_. As for your friends, I suppose they’re the best
people on the Island, aren’t they?”

“Others are much the same,” Bob answered, wrinkling up his forehead. “I
rather chose the pick—a lot are richer—a lot are stuffier—and some
men on the Administration side may be a bit more intelligent, but they
don’t open their mouths much. There’s schoolmasters too, who read more,
but you’ll have enough of them on your own, and missionaries, but we
don’t see much of them—so I think you’ve had the lot.”

They puffed at their cigarettes in a companionable silence that was yet
a little apprehensive and incomplete. Finally Lucy said defensively,
“Mightn’t you find them—some of them anyhow—rather binding after a
bit?”

“Binding?” Bob asked her in a hurt voice. “What’s binding about us? Just
the usual types, aren’t we?”

“Perhaps that’s it,” Lucy said a little uncomfortably. “Being on this
Island hasn’t changed them a bit. We _are_ the usual types but ought we
to be?”

There was a trade wind blowing off the sea, ruffling the bougainvillaeas
and scourging the purple trumpets so that the hummingbirds had to alter
their centrifugal spinning into little sidelong dashes, and to take
their draughts of nectar in rapid insecurity. At ten o’clock in the
morning the mystery of the light was not less, but it had a masklike
quality as if you could easily find beneath it something not lovely at
all, something not responding to hummingbirds in flowering bushes, but
rather to the latticed wings of rackety Johnny Crows.

“I can see why people call the tropics melancholy,” Lucy said at last.
“Don’t you sometimes get the feeling as if we ought to break all this up
and get to the bottom of it? I can’t take it as easily as the people
here seem to do. There’s a line of a sonnet of Rossetti’s I keep
remembering: ‘Sad with the whole of pleasure.’ I feel as if I don’t want
just to have a good time, but to get to see what the Island’s really
about, what the people—the dark people—mean, for after all we’re only
hundreds to their thousands and they need help—they need a different
kind of help from any we’ve ever given them. Our women don’t think about
them at all except in terms of servants, and the men—you too, I
suppose, Bob—just think of how you can work them in order to make your
estates pay.”

“Well, as a matter of fact, what with wages and prices rocketing up,
they _don’t_ pay, not like they used to,” Bob replied rather ruefully.
“I see what you mean, of course—you think we’re all drinking and
laughing and playing games because we’ve got into a flat spin and can’t
get out.”

“Something like that,” Lucy admitted. “When the war was on, we were
caught in things like traps, but we were fighting the things we were in.
Now we’re still in traps, but we’re playing about inside them, and not
fighting to get out, or to get anyone else out, either.”

“Well, just at this moment, I don’t object to not fighting,” Bob said
with a grin. He leaned against the veranda post, his whole being
released in Lucy’s presence. All his bitter nervousness had left him. He
felt young and gay. He was a man in his own home who knows that he has
earned it. “Fun and games,” he murmured, “fun and games. Do you really
want them back, sweetheart? There you used to sit with your headpiece
jammed over your nice smooth hair, listening to us chattering away to
you out of the sky, our lives at the end of a cut rope. In a blind fog,
perhaps, with petrol short, all dressed up and nowhere to go. And you
having to shove us about from our landing place to another which you
knew we might never reach, perhaps a raid on, and bombs screaming, and
bumping up your ’drome, and you just thinking, ‘All I ask is peace. Not
to have to listen to chancy whispers or send that poor boob packing when
he wants to come down. And in a few seconds I may be all blood and dust
myself’—so what?”

Lucy nodded. That was exactly what she had felt with intensity for years
and years and this boy beside her—his back touching her knees—was she
to send him packing once more—away from his landing place—away from
the chosen security of her arms? And what would she think of herself
once she had sent him away? Was she to lose three such men?

“P’raps this is all painted tropics and what not to you,” Bob went on,
throwing his half-finished cigarette away and clasping his knees with
his hands, “but it’s home to me. Before every Op, I’d think what I’d
give just to sit here and watch a hummingbird sizzling in the sunshine.
And now, there they are sizzling and you’re here too. What more could a
fellow want?”

“I know,” Lucy agreed cautiously, “you do deserve it, and in theory I
feel just the same, and yet I know I’d be happier or feel perhaps less
guilty if the dice were loaded against us like they used to be, instead
of what I feel here and now—as if they were loaded _for_ us.” Bob
slipped his hand up and slid it over Lucy’s.

“That’s ’cos you’ve got a nasty little conscience,” he told her. “A
bloody, duty-loving type, that’s what you are, my girl—always wanting
to have someone step on your corns. Well, you ought to be satisfied with
being flung off a balcony on to your clever little head, and getting
your nice-looking arm broken. Relax, my good child, relax and think of
marrying me. Bloody rigid I should have felt going for a Burton, and
leaving no kids behind me—like most of my best pals did—and yours too,
I know—but we couldn’t help losing them, and it doesn’t seem much good
now that we’ve both survived going on our knees and letting our best
chance slip. It is our best chance, being together, isn’t it? You do
_know_ that, don’t you, Lucy?” He turned around and faced her, his hard,
anxious eyes fixed on hers.

“That’s just what I mean,” Lucy said miserably, “by the dice being
loaded too much _for_ us. I just can’t take life that way any more. It
may be Michael and Jerry—losing them, I mean, and yet never being quite
able to feel I _have_ lost them. If you’ve never seen a person you love
dead it’s awfully hard to make your nerves _know_ they are dead. I don’t
know what I _do_ want yet, but it isn’t all this from you. It’s
beautiful, and it’s safe being with you and—and it’s part of me, too,
really, but don’t touch me, Bob—don’t, please.” He let his hand fall
from her shoulder, but his eyes still held hers.

“I’ve got to find out what my work here means and what this Island means
to me,” Lucy went on after a pause. “I know it means something less
safe, less happy perhaps than here, but it’s what I _came_ for. Your
home _is_ England, but I left England. I found I _wanted_ to leave it. I
can’t just rush back into it now because someone pushed me off a balcony
and put a dead bird in my bed.”

“But you do _like_ us, don’t you, Lucy?” Bob demanded anxiously. “You do
think what we fought for—to _be_ British and _stay_ British—was worth
it? Besides, you and I clicked, honest to God, you know we clicked,
don’t you?”

“Clicking isn’t enough,” Lucy said rather coldly, “and of course it’s
just the trouble that I like you. I like all of this much better than I
think I should. I didn’t come out to be made love to and patted on the
back by everybody. I could get that at home. I came out because I
thought I was trained to hand on something I had, and now I don’t know
whether I’ve got it or not—or if I have got it, whether I’m not afraid
to give it. That’s the sort of heroine I am—when people stop purring
all over me!”

Bob took his hand away from hers. “You’re good enough for me,” he said
firmly, “and you haven’t answered my question. If you won’t marry
me—_why_ won’t you? You can start helping the Island afterward—I
shan’t stop you.”

“I must ask you a question first,” Lucy said after a pause. “Do you
agree with your mother that we are different from these people—the
educated dark ones, I mean, on this Island—because of course education
is a basic difference everywhere? Are these children I’m teaching and
have learned to love and respect to know that there is something in me I
won’t try to give them and that they’ll never have, however much they
want it? Are my friends who aren’t white never to feel that I’m just the
same to them as if they were white? You’ve lived here all your
life—surely you can answer me—you _know_?”

“Funny your asking _me_ that,” Bob said in a low, bitter voice, looking
away from her. “Asking _me_ of all people. Still, if no one has yet told
you, someone will soon, and I’d rather it came from me. It’s a bit of a
shower though—a damn nasty shower—to have to tell you on such a
perfect morning! I wonder if it makes it better or worse that knowing
you has made me forget the whole bloody thing, till you brought it up?
Whoever said ‘Let the dead bury their dead’ had something. I was twenty
when I joined the Air Force, and a few months earlier I’d fallen for a
girl on this Island—hook, line, and sinker. She was gorgeous. It was my
first common or Garden of Eden love. Anyhow I thought of this girl day
and night, plumb through my solar plexus. She might have been the girl
Byron saw who walked in beauty like the night. Trouble was she was too
much like the night—she was African. Oh, educated all right. Been a
year at Toronto University—nothing to choose between us except color.
We met by chance on her vacation. I have a motorboat and I took her to
that cove I showed you, and we lived there on and off, week ends
together. I didn’t think of marriage. I wonder if men in love for the
first time ever do. It was just a case of ‘all this and heaven too’ with
me. Then the bust-up came, and I pushed off for Britain. I suppose we
could have got married before I left, but she was too proud to ask and I
was fearfully busy getting things done and snatching every minute I
could just to be with her.

“I think my people knew before I told them. But they didn’t know
Jenny—they’d never seen her and they took it hard. You know my mother,
you say you love her. Well, could I, _could_ I force a daughter-in-law
on her who would make her blood run cold, just when I was going away and
might get killed? Jenny never told me till after I’d left the Island
that there was going to be a child. She just wrote: ‘It’ll be all right
if, when you come back, you want to marry me—and if you don’t, that’ll
be all right too. Only I’ve got to know.’ The letter reached me while we
were racing round the sky, above London. Not ten to one chances against
us—a hundred to one. I left her letter unanswered. After all, why
wouldn’t I be dead in an hour or two? When that do was over, I was
ordered off to the Far East, and that looked pretty shaky too. I wired
‘No can do.’ I thought it was best by then. Everything I’d ever felt had
gone stone cold. Jenny didn’t write again. My mother wrote to me every
few days—wonderful letters. You’re right, she’s worth loving. She went
to see Jenny when the baby came and offered to take the boy and bring it
up at Free Waters. Jenny wouldn’t let her but she was perfectly sensible
about it. Her people took charge of the boy—our boy, only I didn’t feel
like that when I hadn’t seen him, and had left her in the lurch to have
him without a name. Her brother sent her back to Toronto to finish her
education and the baby died of malaria a year later. Jenny was with him.
Afterward when the funeral was over she went for a swim—left her
clothes on a rock, and never came back. Perhaps the sharks got her.
Sweet story, isn’t it, and I suppose it’s the answer to your
question—whites mustn’t make friends with blacks?”

Lucy said nothing. She saw the cove and the green jade pool—the orchids
hanging from the trees—she felt the silence she had felt there, as if
someone were standing by her shoulder, someone she knew was there, but
couldn’t see.

“Who was her brother, Bob,” Lucy asked slowly, “the man who sent her to
Toronto and looked after the child?”

“Oh, didn’t I tell you,” Bob answered carelessly. “That fellow Philip
Calgary, who physics Everslade. He looked after you too, didn’t he, when
you got bashed up?”

“Yes,” said Lucy. “Yes, he looked after me when I got bashed up.” Bob
turned to face Lucy once more. His eyes looked into hers almost she
felt, through hers, to read her heart.

“I’d not leave her now, if she were you,” he said fiercely. “Not for a
wilderness of mothers! But I couldn’t fall for Jenny now either. I’m
old. I don’t want all that glamor shouting at me out of a clear sky. I
want a girl who’s lovely and kind, white inside and out, who knows all
my gen—straight with the straightness I know. What’s more, not hating
me because I’m white and my mother would rather die than touch her with
a barge pole. Don’t you see, when we’re young and raw and have had
things easy like I had, we can’t help thinking the whole thing’s ours!
Life’s eating out of our hand and our fun’s nobody’s business. Well!
I’ve got over that, Lucy. I know we’re lucky if we get anything from
life, even ourselves intact, and I know we’re luckier still if we’ve got
ourselves tamed into facing everyday obligations.”

Lucy said nothing. She could feel the pain and the urgency in Bob
beating against her closed heart even before he took her by the
shoulders and kissed her lips. Cool and soft, her lips met his. She did
not try to stop him. It was a good-by kiss. Nothing in her senses
answered him, and yet she felt curiously moved. She would have liked to
comfort Bob, not because he wanted her and couldn’t get her, but because
long ago he had wanted Jenny and had not known how to take her. Bob let
Lucy go because he knew there was no response to his passionate gesture,
he felt checked but not humiliated by her coldness. There were, he told
himself, still those dead lovers to reckon with. He did not dream that
it was a living man whose image had suddenly—and to Lucy herself
incredibly—blocked his path.

Lucy got up shakily. “I’m sorry,” she murmured, “I have a headache. I
must go indoors. I think it’s the light bothering me.” But when she got
into the cool shuttered darkness of her own room she knew it wasn’t the
light. It was Philip Calgary’s eyes that were looking into hers, his
touch that she longed for, as she flung herself face downward on her bed
and burst into a storm of tears. It was not for her dead lovers that she
wept but because she saw that she must give up her world to reach a
living lover, and that she might—even if she gave it up—never reach
him.




                             _CHAPTER XXII_


Philip was so tired that he could hardly keep awake upon the back of his
steady, plodding mule. He was vaguely conscious of the cool air blowing
from the mountains and the thin gold of the last light.

Everything he saw touched his senses with a deep familiarity. The path,
the hour, the beauty were all his own. Before he realized it, the ravine
closed in and the tall tree ferns by the stream side arched over his
head. He was on a path now which he himself had made. Suddenly the ferns
parted and let the sky through. Black rocks broke up the smooth green
sward. Here was Whiteleaf’s garden. Ginger lilies grew in fabulous
clumps, hedges of hibiscus rose waist-high. Coral pink, crimson, pale
yellow and deep apricot, their veined and cuplike flowers lifted
themselves into the golden air. Lilac sorrel strayed by the stream’s
side, and up and down the sharp spiked rocks, like little tongues of
flame, ran scarlet putchella. These flowers had not grown by chance in
their carefree niches. A hand and brain had planned with care and love
their resting place. Wild begonias jostled forget-me-nots on shaded
ledges, holding just earth enough for their frail foothold. A field of
golden dewdrops spread themselves like a cloth of gold under a
silk-cotton tree. Whiteleaf’s mind had drawn these plants together and
designed their background. Trees had been cut down to free them into
light or planted to give them shelter. Their beauty and strangeness was
not theirs alone. It belonged to a whole ancient civilization—they were
the witnesses of Whiteleaf’s Chinese heart. Before tonight Philip had
never thought of Whiteleaf as Chinese. She had always seemed to him like
a suddenly discovered part of himself. They had spoken the same language
and wanted the same things for their world. Neither had used art or
subterfuge in their dealings with each other. Never had repetition
dulled the sweetness of their contact, nor rubbed the bloom from their
deep courtesy of loving.

The gold air turned colorless as Philip looked through the cleared space
before the house. A moment later he saw Whiteleaf. She was standing, her
hands resting on the rail of the veranda, looking toward the gap in the
trees. She wore a pale blue-gray kimono like the wings of a wood pigeon.

The soft vague color accentuated the black masses of her hair piled high
above her smooth forehead. Philip stood quite still for a moment,
looking up at her as if he saw her for the first time. Her skin had the
velvety texture of a primrose, while her brows, soft as the furred wings
of a moth, arched above the liquid depths of her dark slanting eyes. “No
wonder she knows so much about flowers,” Philip thought tenderly as he
looked at her, “she is one herself.”

“Everything is ready for you,” Whiteleaf said in her clear voice. She
hesitated for a moment as if she too felt a curious sense of strangeness
in the silent man below her. Then her lips parted in a smile, and she
ran down the steps into his arms. “How I longed to be with you,” she
murmured, “in all that horror—that heat—that sadness—down below!”

“If you hadn’t been with me,” Philip answered, suddenly convinced of the
truth of his words, “I could never have come out of it.” The sound of
the waterfall plunged all his senses into coolness. The hush of twilight
wrapped the little hut in peace. Whiteleaf had laid their supper as
usual on the veranda where they could watch the moon rise. Slowly the
great silk-cotton tree standing in the center of the glade lost its
shape and became one with darkness. Stars came out in the clear sky,
growing clearer and larger as the earth below them lost its features one
by one.

They talked very little to each other. Whiteleaf’s light efficiency had
no pressure in it. Rightness was like a bird’s song to her in its
easiness. Only their eyes meeting each other were graver than usual.
Slowly, as he ate and drank, Philip told her the history of his last two
weeks’ epidemic; but in her presence each incident released itself from
horror. He felt strength coming back into his body. He even heard
himself laugh once at the flight of the nurses and the shifts he had
been put to, and of how an old woman who had gone to hospital to die
suddenly got up from her bed to cook for the whole hospital and became
his greatest standby. Above their shack the Flames-of-the-Forest held
high their colorless cups till—beating against their scarlet walls—the
moon’s slow radiance revealed color as well as form. A night-blooming
cereus, crimson-hearted behind its spine of thorns, opened in silent
splendor. Slowly the cotton tree unwound itself from darkness till they
could see its separate great branches spreading in benediction over half
the glade. Except for the uneven chanting of the waterfall there was no
sound, save when on silken wings, white as a spirit, a great owl swept
by, or there was a movement in the trees as if something wandered
through them, brushing against their leaves in passing.

They rested side by side on mattresses spread out on the veranda,
smoking and talking intermittently to each other. At last Philip rose
and stamped out his cigarette. “Now we can bathe,” he said. “The moon
will be shining on the stream.” Whiteleaf made no direct answer. She
turned to watch the hill divide itself from the moon and move nearer to
them, then she said, “You go first, Philip.” Philip threw off his
clothes and, taking a towel over his shoulder, went down to the pool,
alone for the first time.

The moon made one of those strange leaps she makes in mountain places,
throwing darkness like a cast-off cloak behind her. The leaves of the
palms were drenched with light, and the foam of the falls shone like
diamonds.

Philip waited for a while until he knew that Whiteleaf was not going to
join him. He was vaguely disappointed, because he loved to watch
Whiteleaf’s small curved body slip into the pool, not timorously but
giving herself wholeheartedly to it without hesitation. The pool became
enriched by the way Whiteleaf became a part of it. There was a smooth
felicity in the way her bones fitted into her flesh; although she was
under middle height, she was so erect and slender that she never gave
the effect of smallness.

A surgeon notices how bones and muscles co-ordinate and work together in
a well-proportioned body. It is rare to find this undriven natural
force, since few people have trained their bodies from babyhood upward,
untormented by the friction of their minds. The pool, though the
moonlight made it shine like a looking glass, to Philip seemed dark and
empty without Whiteleaf. He wanted to shout her name and make her come
to him, but the law of their life together had been never to force or
hurry each other into any action against the will of the other, so
without waiting longer, Philip dived into the silvery water and took his
swim alone. When he had finished, he lay once more on his mattress
watching the moon sink long shafts of gold between the black shadows of
the trees. He had time to light another cigarette and smoke it through
while Whiteleaf went down to the pool alone, and came back alone. She
lay beside him without touching him.

Desire began to creep through Philip’s tired veins and he turned toward
her, putting out his hand to take hers for consent, before he embraced
her. For the first time in eight years Whiteleaf said, “No.”

It was so strange to Philip that he held his breath after she had
spoken. He found he could not ask her why. She closed her fingers around
his hand and held it fast. At last he murmured uncertainly, “You are
tired this evening, Whiteleaf—too tired even for love?”

“For that, never,” she answered quietly, “but you see, Philip, you no
longer love me!”

He cried out in his mind, “That is a lie!” but he could not force the
words past his lips.

He was silent, listening to what the whole of him really felt about this
bitter accusation. “Whiteleaf, I feel for you both desire and
constancy,” he said at last, “why then do you deny my love?”

“Yes,” Whiteleaf answered quietly, “I do not doubt that you have both
these gifts for me, Philip, but they are not enough. They are not all
you have and—only all you have is enough.”

“But—but, Whiteleaf,” Philip stammered in his eagerness to break down
the intangible barrier between them, “what more can there be? We have
had everything—all these years. It is true that we have never been
together long enough, for we have not been able to live together all the
time, and only all the time would have been enough.”

“Time,” Whiteleaf said inexorably, “has nothing to do with love. Don’t
you know that what we felt for each other was outside time? It was life
itself. All of me, and all of you, went into our love. There were no
separate moments, and this made a third thing—a life. It should have
been a child, I know, but since that could not be, what we had was
nevertheless what a child _is_—a separate created life made by us out
of each other. But we no longer share everything so now we cannot make a
third thing any more.”

Philip could not answer her, but he was glad that Whiteleaf still held
his hand close in hers as if it belonged to her. He had never been able
to protect her or to give her what a husband longs to give his wife—all
his strength and all his manhood, enriched by her claims upon it.
Whiteleaf had made no claims, but she herself had been what Philip
claimed. The whole of his undivided life was in the bond between them,
and now he felt like a beggar who has no rights and who has even been
refused alms.

For a time he was so bitter with disappointment that he could not speak,
then he said, “For you to leave me—if this means that you are about to
leave me—I could understand. We both knew this parting must come. You
have your creed and your country apart from mine. But why do you leave
me before you must? Why do you refuse me now while we are still
together? Why do you dare to speak as if my love had failed you, when it
is you who go and I who must stay? This is my proper place as China is
yours. Your creed calls you there—mine keeps me here. Why should we
part except as space parts us? Why do you refuse me, Whiteleaf, this
last time?”

Whiteleaf was silent. Her hand gripped his, but she did not draw him to
her heart. “I find it difficult to say what I am going to say, Philip,”
she said at last. “To refuse you is also difficult. It is quite true
that love does not alter with space or time, it is deeper than both, but
it must be complete. Between us now there would be falsity—if it were
not complete.”

“Has it not always been complete?” Philip asked, angrily drawing away
his hand.

“Yes,” Whiteleaf answered, “and it is because it always has, that now it
is incomplete, we must stop being lovers.”

Philip did not want to know what she meant, nor did he want to give up
his desire without fulfillment. He felt ashamed, for he was not sure
that his love for Whiteleaf was still complete. He knew that there are
men and women who use love lightly as a mere physical need or as harlots
use it for gain. Such a love is easy and insignificant. It can be given
up as lightly as it is used, since it is not more part of a human being
than plumbing or money are parts of us, though we may find both at times
convenient. There are others who accept physical need as if it were a
weakness or a disgrace. But to Philip, love had been true love,
containing body and soul. It had penetrated his whole being, and he knew
that it was this love which Whiteleaf now claimed and felt was missing.
He could not argue with her about her loss. She lay beside him like a
piece of seaweed from which the tide has withdrawn.

“Don’t you see,” Whiteleaf said at last, “that you cannot give me even
your desire or your constancy now? They belong—as all the rest of you
belongs now—to Lucy.”

If she had ripped him with a knife between his shoulder blades it would
have hurt Philip less than her words. He lay beside her like a log, for
it was what he felt like—dead wood, severed from a living tree.
Suddenly he knew that Whiteleaf was crying silently in the dark but he
did not touch her. Only after a while her silent tears helped him to
speak. “What nonsense,” he said bitterly. “A white woman! Lucy!” And
then he could have bitten his tongue out for having spoken her name. It
hurt him as if he were denying the blood that was running through his
heart. He knew the truth even while he was denying it. He loved Lucy.

“It will be a great pain,” Whiteleaf murmured gently, “but it is not
nonsense. She is a brave girl with a true heart—a little spoiled,
perhaps, because she has been too much admired by too many men, and has
always believed that to do her duty is enough. That is unfortunate
because we seldom know what our duty is, nor is it ever enough. But
these British limitations she will outgrow—through your love.”

Philip sat up, clasping his arms around his knees. He was trying to be
reasonable, but it did not come easily to him at the moment, staring
into the bright, empty light with Whiteleaf close to him and yet as
distant and as cold as the moon.

“I don’t say that any man could _not_ love Lucy,” he admitted. “She has
beauty and kindness, but to speak as if a white girl in her position
could love me is an insult to her intelligence and to mine. No doubt she
might like me to lose my head over her—out of vanity—with perhaps a
dash of friendship. More than that could never happen—and even that
cannot happen if I do _not_ lose my head.”

“And if I tell you that it has already happened, and that you cannot
command the laws of the universe nor push time back?” Whiteleaf
demanded, smiling through her tears. “My dear, foolish Philip, Lucy
already loves you. When you saw Lucy lying broken on the ground you
loved her, and when, waking up from her unconsciousness, she saw your
face as she had never yet seen it—she loved you.”

Philip sprang up and walked to the veranda’s edge. He felt as if he
wanted to break something, but he did not know what it was that he
wanted to break.

The glade swam in moonlight—that perplexing light which is so clear,
yet so weak, like the brain of a drunkard. He stood there for a long
time fighting what Whiteleaf had said to him, and not being able to
conquer it. He thought of the old nursery ballad his mother had taught
him: “The Lion and the Unicorn were fighting for the crown. The Lion
beat the Unicorn all round the town.” Whiteleaf and he had been lucky in
love, for each of them the crown had been a separate jewel so that they
had never had to compete with each other. Nothing even now could take
away from the happiness of those long years of understanding and love.

Philip turned back toward her at last, and once more sat crosslegged on
his mattress beside her, but he knew that he was defeated. He was not
the Lion any more.

“If what you say is true,” he told her, starting on a fresh cigarette,
“Lucy and I are both doomed from the start. I must try to get a job off
the Island.”

“In love,” Whiteleaf said, laughing at him through her tears, “you
cannot settle all such matters alone like the Holy Ghost brooding over
the face of the waters! You are Adam, and Eve is a part of you! You must
share your apple. There have been many successful mixed marriages after
all—exceptional, I grant you—but you two are also exceptional.”

“The most successful one I know,” Philip said in a low, bitter voice,
“is that of one of my own colleagues. He often sits with his back to his
wife at breakfast so that she cannot see his face. Yet she loves him.
She told me the story herself. It is only to _him_ that it is unbearable
that she should see his face.”

“We cannot alter facts,” Whiteleaf said in her clear reasonable voice,
“but we can alter our ways of looking at them. Have we not been happy?
Yet I am Chinese and you West Indian. If you turned your back on Lucy it
is _she_ who would suffer most. Not because your face is dark but
because you turned it away from her. It would be highly unreasonable and
unfair to punish Lucy because of a self-torturing sense of inferiority
due to the law of pigmentation.”

Philip gave a sound that was half a groan, half a laugh, and Whiteleaf
suddenly covered her face with her hands, “No, no, no,” she sobbed. He
drew her into his arms, holding her as if she were the child that they
had never had. It seemed to Philip that he had never loved Whiteleaf
with so deep a tenderness. After a time she stopped sobbing. “If we had
always been together, Philip,” she whispered, “if we had had a home and
children as you always wanted—and I refused because I am a Communist,
trained by them for the use of China—then none of this need have
happened. I was a fool. I thought to have both, my life and my creed,
but they were not the same. Perhaps it is true what you say—we are
human beings _first_ before we are Communists or belong to our own
countries. I was arrogant—I believed I could hold you while we were
disobeying the laws of life, and before Lucy came it was true, I did
hold you! I still hoped you would become a Communist and that when I had
to return to China you would return with me. But now—but now . . .
Please believe me, Philip, that this parting is all my fault. I only cry
because I _made_ my tears.”

“They are _our_ tears, we made them together,” Philip insisted. “Are my
eyes dry? No one can rob us of those years we have had together—they
will outlast everything we feel now.”

The moon dropped behind the cotton tree and lost itself in the smaller
trees of the forest. There was no light left now, but the single, remote
gleams, from separate stars, divided by darkness. Whiteleaf did not
remind Philip that what would last would not be life, only a memory of
living, but she moved out of his arms.

“Remember only this,” she whispered. “If I had put love first we would
not have lost it. Do not—you who were wise for us both together once,
be foolish now for Lucy. Put love first!”

Whiteleaf was soon asleep, although she loved Philip and knew that he no
longer loved her. She had no guilt upon her heart, only sorrow. But
Philip could not sleep. He felt guilty because he was sure that if he
had cared for Whiteleaf as deeply as she had cared for him, Lucy would
never have shaken him out of his security. He knew it was for him—not
for the loss of him—that Whiteleaf wept.

Philip fell asleep at last, exhausted body and soul, and woke at dawn to
find Whiteleaf no longer by his side. Each tree in turn was moving away
from the massed darkness into the thin new light. Birds rustled and
cried out to each other in short brief songs. Philip called her name
twice and then stepped into the living room to find the last trace of
Whiteleaf. A note lay waiting for him on the table.

    “My dearest, I have gone. My ship sails today. Do not try to see
    me again. We have had everything. Do not grieve for me, and do
    not make Lucy grieve because she is not me. I have my work. I go
    to comrades to make our new country—make yours here on this
    island that was our home.”

She had not signed the letter.

Philip rushed out and plunged into the ravine. His strength had come
back to him, but without hope. He used every atom of power that he
possessed to reach the port in time, but knew that it was in vain. The
ship had already left the dock but she passed close by the promontory on
which Philip stood. The passage between the land and the Island through
which the channel ran was deep. Big ships had to go at a great speed
through the narrow passage because of the current’s strength. Philip
could see the separate figures on the deck and knew that they could see
his own tall figure standing alone under the feathered palms. The ship
flew like a strong white bird, between Philip and the Island, out to the
sea. She grew smaller and smaller while he tried to hold her back with
his eyes. There was nothing left at last but the Island with the foam
rising high above its rocks, and where the ship had been, the emptiness
of the unruffled sea.




                            _CHAPTER XXIII_


Into Jessica’s quickened senses coolness poured with the approach of
night. Her unseeing eyes would no longer be alone with darkness. Her
hand, resting on the head of the big dog at her feet, felt his ears
prick forward. A moment later she heard the quick approach of a car. But
it was coming in the wrong direction, down from the Ridge, not up from
the Gap, so that it couldn’t be Philip’s car. The dog’s hair pricked
upward under her fingers. He was on the balls of his toes and off in a
flash toward the garden gate; his deep bark, like the bell of a
cathedral, warned the approaching traveler of his formidable
guardianship. Sooner than usual the barking stopped. The approaching
footsteps were light.

“A girl comes,” Jessica told herself, “and she is white—the whole of
her foot is not on the ground at the same time.” She rose, a stately
figure, carrying sixty years easily in her great frame, to greet her
unexpected visitor. Lucy, meeting the steady sightless eyes in the
chocolate-dark face, felt a curious sense of awe and incredulity
together. Was this a servant, this heavy-featured African, or Philip’s
mother? And what difference must it make to her which it was?
“Does—does Dr. Calgary live here?” she asked diffidently.

“Yes,” Jessica said in the soft, uptilting drawl of the Island, with its
hidden depth of questioning, as if a human being had no fixed right to
his own speech. “This is his home. He is not here now, but tonight he
may come, for I have just heard the epidemic on the plains is over. I am
his mother.”

Jessica had educated herself late in life, she had taught herself to
separate the fluid vowels of her race; in her mind she had almost
isolated herself from her own people in order to speak as Philip spoke.
Yet sometimes she was distrustful of this new art. Had she really
crossed the gulf between the instinctive world of her childhood and this
life of afterthoughts and swift corrections?

“This girl is afraid,” Jessica said to herself, “she has seen
Philip—that beautiful pale god my husband gave me, with the straight
features and the golden skin—she could not know his mother was just an
old Negress.”

“Perhaps you would like to wait for him?” she said politely. “Will you
sit on the veranda for a while? I cannot tell if the sun has gone yet
because I am blind, but the twilight will soon come.”

The girl moved up the steps and took Jessica’s hand. She said in a
quick, moved voice, “I always wanted to come and see you. I am one of
the schoolmistresses from Everslade. My name is Lucy Armstrong.” She did
not explain why, if she had always wanted to come, she had not come.
Perhaps she did not know herself how she had dreaded as well as longed
for this strange moment, when she must know for the first time the
difference between herself and Philip.

It was twilight, and the sudden hush of the withdrawing light already
filled the garden. The contented murmuring of the small golden bees in
the logwood fields before the house slowly grew thin and ceased. From
time to time a bird called as if it wanted company and was afraid of the
dark. Jessica settled herself unhesitatingly in her big rocking chair
and the dog flung himself at her feet with a heavy sigh, as if he
regretted that the moment’s excitement was now over. Lucy could see
through the opened windows into the little house. It was an
astonishingly small house, pink walled like an empty shell, the only
sitting room opened into two small bedrooms, spotlessly clean and neat,
but supplying the minimum of human needs. A shed at the back of the
house was where Mrs. Calgary cooked. Here she kept her herbs and all her
kitchen utensils. The pride of her life was a real bathroom supplied by
water from the stream that ran through her garden and dropped into the
ravine, but she never thought of the bathroom as part of their house—it
was like Philip’s books, another world into which with a great effort
her mind penetrated, as a child might look through a scientist’s
microscope. The trees and the sky pressed down upon the little house as
if to absorb it into themselves.

“How beautiful the scent of the flowers is from your garden!” Lucy said
at last.

“There is a little dampness in the air now,” Jessica said. “In the
daytime the scent is there, but it is struck out of the flowers by the
heat of the sun, it does not become part of the air and melt into it, as
the fragrance does after the sun is set. Plants are like people, they
live best together in gentleness. People say we must have green hands
who make good gardens, but it is really a green heart we must have to
meet each need of every plant as it comes.” Jessica paused and waited as
if for Lucy to say what her own need was, and to Lucy’s surprise she
found herself saying it.

“Something has happened,” she began, “at Everslade. I could hardly
believe it. I have been away on a short holiday, and when I came back,
Whiteleaf Ho Sung, our most trusted helper, who runs the annex for our
delicate children, had gone. She has sailed to China. She left a note
for me, but she didn’t really tell me anything. That is why I came
here—I thought your son—who looks after the sick children—might know
more.”

Jessica’s chair stopped rocking. She had sat quite still before, but now
she sat with a rigid stillness, her big dark hands closed tightly upon
each other. “Whiteleaf has gone?” she murmured. Her voice had a way of
entering the silence almost as if it were a part of it.

“I was so sorry,” Lucy explained, “so surprised too, because somehow it
isn’t like her. Poor little Myra O’San, who is her devoted friend, knows
no more than I do why she went, though Whiteleaf did say good-by to her,
but that was all—and to the others she didn’t even say good-by! I have
to ring up the committee tomorrow and tell them, but I knew she was a
friend of yours, and your son’s, so I ventured to come here first.”

“Yes, she is indeed our friend,” Jessica said at last, but not until
Hector had put his paw up and anxiously touched her knee, as if he
sensed that something unusual had happened, which must receive his
direct attention. “She is my friend—and Philip’s. He will know why she
went. I did not know this thing had happened. China is very
disturbed—very unhappy—my son tells me there is a flood of new life
there drowning out the old. It may be there was a call for her. She has
many skills.” Silence settled once more between them, a listening
silence. Lucy could hear nothing but the tiny stirring of the night life
in the garden—birds settling in their nests, or a leaf moving against
another leaf.

Suddenly Jessica and the dog together rose with astonishing swiftness.
“It is my son’s car coming,” Jessica told her. She was already down the
steps, and Lucy watched her move unfalteringly across the garden and the
field which separated the house from the road. She must have reached the
gate before the car stopped, but the trees hid their meeting from Lucy.
It was a long while before they came very slowly along the path
together, as if they were carrying a heavy weight between them. Even the
dog’s eagerness was quenched. Lucy was aghast at the change in Philip.
His cheeks were hollowed till the bones showed, the veins in his temples
stood out like cords, his eyes were sunk backward into his head, his
lithe, resilient body moved as if it took his last strength to drag it.

Jessica paused for a moment, turning in Lucy’s direction but as if she
could not quite place where she stood. “I will make some coffee,” she
said, “while my son tells you about Whiteleaf.” Philip sat on the
veranda steps, his back against the railing, looking out into the
garden. His eyes had met Lucy’s only for a moment, with a strange glance
of reproach.

“I had to come,” she said defensively, “I wanted so much to understand.”
He still said nothing, yet Lucy knew that he was intensely aware of her
presence, though she could not be sure if his awareness gave him pain or
pleasure.

“To be a Communist,” he said at last, “is not a very good advertisement
for a teacher, but since she has gone it will do her no harm to speak of
it. I need not tell you that Whiteleaf meant to keep her faith to
herself, but her creed was herself, and she belonged with it to her own
country. Perhaps at this juncture I should tell you that I am not myself
a Communist, though I am perhaps more in agreement with their spoken
creed than I am with anything which a good Britisher would approve. But
I do not accept dictatorship from human beings as faulty as myself. I
like to be an individual and responsible for my own choice. Whiteleaf’s
reason for leaving us so suddenly was no doubt that she received an
order from those who sent her here. She has had ten years’ training in
foreign lands, she is proficient in all she was sent to learn. Another
day, another hour would seem to the Party a waste of time. Communists
are economical—except of human rights. These they expend lavishly for
their own purposes.”

“She—she had no other reason?” Lucy asked in a strained voice.

“If she had, it was a private one,” Philip answered briefly. His voice
was low, and the bitterness in it was controlled, but it reached Lucy
all the more for the restraint he had laid upon it.

“You are angry with me for coming here?” she murmured.

“Please don’t think so,” Philip answered with biting courtesy. “It was
most kind of you to suppose our interest in Whiteleaf was equal to your
own, and quite correct. I was unable actually to speak with her before
she sailed, but I saw her boat leave and satisfied myself that she had
sailed. She will not return.”

Darkness slid into the flowered garden. One by one, trees and blossoms
lost their color and their outline. The advancing shadows swept away the
hollows in Philip’s face, but Lucy could still see his profile, like a
carving in some inflexible material.

“I wish you would read her letter to me,” Lucy said at last. “I liked
her so much—I felt she was my friend, but this doesn’t sound like a
friend’s letter—will you read it and tell me what you think?” A faintly
derisive smile touched Philip’s lips; he turned his head and looked
fully at Lucy.

“Does it really strike you as very surprising,” he asked her, “that
Asiatics, possibly even some Africans, might suffer from a color
prejudice against white people? It is very regrettable, of course—all
such discriminations are to my mind regrettable, but they exist.”

“That couldn’t be true between us,” Lucy said in a shocked voice.
“Whiteleaf wasn’t like that—and she knew I wasn’t!”

Philip held out his hand for the letter. “Doctors are skeptical people,”
he observed. “We must not always believe what our patients tell us, so
we sometimes fail to believe what our friends tell us, or even what we
tell ourselves.”

There was just light enough for Philip’s keen eyes to follow the clear
exquisite handwriting, each letter a separate picture, which he knew by
heart. He read Whiteleaf’s letter very slowly and handed it back to Lucy
without comment.

    “Dear Mrs. Armstrong,” he read. “It is with great regret that I
    leave Everslade in this sudden manner and without bidding you
    farewell. I was told that by a sudden cancellation I could sail
    on a ship that left immediately, and I had received a message
    that I must take the first opportunity to return to China. I
    hope that you will find no great difficulty in replacing me.
    Many Toronto students well taught in my subjects would like to
    come to the Island for a time.

    “May I say how greatly I appreciate your kindness to Myra O’San?
    I commend this little girl, not assisted by fortune but rich in
    merit, to your friendly care. She has enemies at Everslade, so
    have you. They are the same enemies. Do not let them separate
    her from you, for both your sakes. Forgive my frankness. It
    grieves me to be no further use to anyone at Everslade.

             Your faithful colleague,
                 Whiteleaf Ho Sung.”

The silence deepened around them, the scent of tobacco plants and the
sweetness of a bed of stocks mingled with the aroma of freshly roasted
coffee from the house. It was so friendly and domestic a scent and
sharing it brought them so close together that Lucy ventured to say at
last, “Why did you want to get rid of me? Was it because of Whiteleaf’s
going? Why did you throw me into Free Waters—you must have known what
it meant?” She could not go on against the icy blankness of Philip’s
face. It was impassable as a crevasse in a glacier.

“Yes, I knew what it meant,” he agreed with a lift of his heavy
eyebrows. “It was a separation from things which did not concern you and
I had hoped might lead to more insight into matters which _should_
concern you.”

Lucy felt helpless against Philip’s mockery, outclassed and ashamed by
what she thought was his far greater respect for Whiteleaf. Perhaps, she
said to herself, Philip was in the right. She had let Bob kiss her after
he had told her about Jenny. Whiteleaf would never have submitted to
such an alien tenderness.

“But I didn’t know about Jenny before I went there,” she whispered half
to herself and half to Philip. “If I had known I wouldn’t have gone.”

“It’s better you should know, and from your own friends,” Philip said
gravely, dropping his mockery. “Here on this island such stories are of
common occurrence. As long as such connections are illicit,
miscegenation is countenanced, it is only in these rare cases when white
men _marry_ colored women that it becomes a stigma not to be handed
down. People talk of a color bar but what they mean of course is a
psychological disgrace. Jews were less despised—in the countries where
they are still despised—_before_—than _after_—six million of them
were murdered for the sake of their inferiority. It was not, you see, so
obvious that they _were_ inferior until they were murdered. Such
knowledge as this is a part of what you must learn on the Island in
order to safeguard yourself against your unfortunate lack of color
prejudice.”

“But I will never learn it,” Lucy said passionately. “I have always
wanted to explain to you—it’s what made me come here—not that I
thought about it quite like that. I just wanted to get away from a life
that didn’t seem real after the war—you see, I was so used to real
things, being friends with everyone who was in your job if you could, or
anyhow friends enough to work well with them, because you had to,
because working together well mattered terribly. Where people are close
to death all the time they have to behave properly: I don’t mean we were
proper in a conventional sense—we were often reckless, but not of each
other—I mean when one of us was browned off or up against it we all
stood by him. We—it was a different relation—you can’t get it now in
the same way—the men I loved—you know I was married for three months
and two years afterward I was engaged for a few weeks—made me
different. It wasn’t just romantic and tragic loving them, the way
people pretend now, it was horrible and raw—and wrong—that was it,
Philip, fundamentally _wrong_! People oughtn’t to have to die like that,
and if they oughtn’t to die against each other, it must somehow come out
of living _with_ and _for_ each other. You’re a doctor, you ought to
know we should only fight against death and disease and pain, never
against each other. Whiteleaf knew that.”

“Yes,” Philip agreed, glad that he could no longer see her beauty in the
gathering dark. “You are quite right. Whiteleaf knew it, and lived it,
and that may have been one of the reasons which made her leave us. Do
not think of me as your enemy, please, because I point out to you that
we should consider our work first—you have yours, and I have mine. I do
not think it is necessary or would be helpful for either of us to meet
again. The annex can be closed. I will dispose of my little patients
elsewhere. Let this be our last meeting.”

“Philip,” Lucy said desperately, “you can’t possibly want this any more
than I do! We _discovered_ we were friends. Life isn’t so rich that we
can afford to sacrifice friendship for the sake of prejudices.”

“Perhaps it is not altogether friendship that we are talking about,”
Philip said gently. “Be reasonable, Lucy.” Her name slipped out before
he could bite it back, and with her name his secret. Lucy knew now why
Whiteleaf had gone away.

“You wouldn’t be so cruel,” she said slowly, “either to yourself or to
me. You know quite well you are trying to tie me up to things I have
outgrown and don’t want any more. I have to learn to get into a
different way of thinking and living and only you can teach me.
Whiteleaf would have helped me and I had believed Elvira would, but I
somehow don’t think so any more. There’s no one else but you, Philip.”

“I think you’re wrong to ask it,” Philip said firmly. “I tell you I know
what I am talking about. It’s been burned into my blood. We dark people
in countries owned and run by white ones drink in this agonizing sense
of inferiority with our mother’s milk. If we try to escape into the life
of the mind we find you there before us. Our thoughts are colored by
your thoughts, inhibited by your restrictions. It is true that some of
us break out of our strait jackets and some of your people even help to
release us, but there are a million dark people on this
island—Africans, Indians, mixed races—and how many of these can stand
upon their own feet and compete on equal terms with their rulers? Who
possess the riches of the Island? Who controls them? Do you suppose the
mere handful of us who get over our limitations enjoy our isolation? The
link between us—if there should be such a link—would ruin your work
and mine. You have something to give our Island children. I respect your
work and we are all grateful for it. I realize that you are not
prejudiced, that you recognize and can train our children’s
potentialities into fresh powers. I understand that you would have
chosen Whiteleaf and myself to be your friends if you had had your way.
I wish I didn’t. It would be a great help to me if I could think you
arrogant and ignorant, as the arrogant always are. But I know you are
not, and it is just because you are not that you can help to train the
girls of this Island toward courage and show them how to lead fuller and
richer lives.”

He stopped abruptly; above them towered the tall dark shadow of his
mother.

“I have brought you your coffee,” she said, as Philip rose and took the
tray out of her hands. “Now perhaps you are too tired to eat, Philip,
but drink this and you will soon feel better. You too, Mrs. Armstrong,
need strength.” Jessica sat down again in the old rocking chair and the
simplicity of her presence gave them both a strange new ease. Philip
relaxed his long tension. He did not think or struggle any more against
what was in his heart. Instead he watched Lucy’s hand holding her coffee
cup.

“Mrs. Calgary,” Lucy said, “don’t you think we ought all of us on the
Island just to be human beings, equally friendly with each other? Do you
think it matters whether we’re black or white, or what language we
speak?”

Jessica’s chair stopped rocking. Philip turned his head toward his
mother. His love saw the heavy features of the old dark face, but pain
stirred in his heart with his love.

“The good Lord,” his mother said slowly, “has made all his children and
he must like us different—or surely he would have made us the same. The
Lord doesn’t have favorites. In my herb garden none of my herbs are the
same. What I give folks for wounds heal wounds but won’t heal fever, and
what I give folks for fever heals fever but won’t heal wounds. They are
both good herbs growing in the same garden. It is as I have always told
my son Philip and he knows it as well as I do.”

“My mother oversimplifies,” Philip said. He got up and stood
effortlessly now, as if his strength were returning to him, and walked
in friendly silence with Lucy to the gate. “It isn’t as easy as my
mother makes it sound,” he said when he had seen her into the car.
“Herbs don’t back-chat.”

“But you won’t give up the annex?” Lucy pleaded. “If you do I shall lose
Henriette too, and perhaps Myra—I should be quite alone, with—with my
enemies, if Whiteleaf is right and I really have enemies.”

Philip shook his head at Lucy, but his eyes smiled. She had triumphed.
She had drawn him to a point beyond which he couldn’t go. He couldn’t
refuse to protect her.




                             _CHAPTER XXIV_


Lucy drove back to Everslade, strangely illumined and reassured to face
her task.

She was not naturally fearful and she thought that any danger that might
have lurked in the school was probably due to the false loyalties of the
girls, or to antagonism between Elvira and Whiteleaf. Adolescent
exaggeration may often lead to crime, and child delinquencies are more
dangerous than those of adults, because children have no grasp of
consequences. Probably, Lucy told herself, Petronella was the source of
all the mischief, and Petronella with her tool Angela had now vanished.

Lucy worked up till midnight in order to free herself next day for an
hour or two alone with Myra O’San. She felt that she must, if it were
within her power, loosen the tension of the child’s first acute sorrow.
It was early afternoon before she could leave the school and take Myra
with her.

“Do you think,” she asked, “that you could drive me to the bamboo grove
beyond the Falls? I have never seen it, and I still find driving tiring
for my arm. I am free till teatime.”

Myra’s eyes shone like water over hard metal. “Yes,” she said, “I have
learned to drive, and if you want me Miss Peck will excuse me from our
botany walk.”

They started in silence down the long zigzag mountain road. “Could you
tell me,” Lucy asked Myra at last, “how long ago you knew that Whiteleaf
was leaving us?”

Myra nodded. “I knew,” she said, “because Whiteleaf warned me often that
she had work in China that must come before her work here, and that when
she was sent for she must go. But I don’t think Whiteleaf herself knew
_when_. The day after you left I found her packing—packing everything,
not just what she needed for her free week-end—so then I knew, and when
I asked her she told me.”

“Did she tell you anything else?” Lucy asked. “I mean anything I have a
right to know about the school, or—or about myself?”

Myra was silent for a moment, driving very carefully and slowly through
the golden air, which still pressed down upon them with the heat of
noon. “She said you are to be my work—more even than my lessons. I am
here to serve you. You see, when I knew Whiteleaf was leaving I wanted
to go away too, back to my father, but she said my place was at present
here, that I must not leave you.”

Lucy said quickly, “I am very glad she asked you to stay—but not to
serve me, Myra. I want your friendship if you can give it to me. Not one
of the older girls yet has given me any friendship though I have been
here nearly a year. Most of my work is with them, and I find it hard to
teach against determined hostility. I know you are not hostile to me,
and it helps me very much. I cannot be to you anything like Miss Ho Sung
was—I wish I could. I admired her very much, but I do like you for
yourself, and I hope that some day you may like me for myself, in the
same way.”

“That I already do,” Myra assured Lucy solemnly. “I liked you at once,
from the time you told us about the sailor and the albatross. I found
that it was what I also saw. To have to wear a dead bird around your
neck—whether you have killed it or not—is hard; but my father has told
me not all misfortunes are useless. ‘Be sorry,’ he said to me, ‘for
those who have nothing wrong with them—they may have worse.’ He meant,
I think, that I should not be too sorry for my own ugliness and that
perhaps I could turn it into a strength. You see, if I were not so ugly
I might perhaps be cruel or false or a coward. If I were beautiful I
might forget that such things are even uglier than a black Chinese
face.”

“But when you love a face,” Lucy said gently, “it is never ugly to you.
People come through their faces as soon as you know them. I think one
seldom looks twice at a known face. I once met a girl who was as pretty
as a painted plate on the wall, but after you had seen what the pattern
was and how pretty the colors, you just forgot and even got rather tired
of looking at her because she was a dull girl and never had anything new
to show you.”

“But the person to whom I was never ugly has gone away,” Myra reminded
her, and her voice, but not her steady hand on the wheel, shook as she
spoke.

Lucy, to whom the emptiness of comfort was a well-known ache, made no
direct comment, but after a pause she said: “Whiteleaf is not dead and
you are young, some day you can go to China. I have a feeling she won’t
change and that you would find her just the same. There is something
Whiteleaf said in the note she left me which I think you ought to know,
she said that you and I both had enemies and that they were the same
enemies. I hope she was not right, and that these enemies, if we ever
had them, have already gone away, but if you have any fresh difficulties
or I have them, shall we tell each other about them?”

The heavy, troubled face of the child lightened slowly. “Yes,” she said,
“I think that would be a very good plan. I never had a white friend
before. I had meant to be your servant, and look after you as Whiteleaf
said I should. But what you speak of is different. It is much more.”

“It will grow more, I think,” Lucy answered, “because we have to make
friends slowly, just through what happens, but it is my choice if it is
also yours.”

“It is mine,” Myra O’San said firmly, but in a hushed voice, as if she
were moving into a world which might have surprises—some of them even
terrifying surprises.

In the distance they could see the bamboo grove; the long avenue of
trees opened out in front of them, hiding the fields through which they
drove. Overhead the branches spread so thickly that they formed a cavern
of green drenched with gold. The bright emerald leaves dipped their
light downward into the dusty road. Myra stopped the car so that they
could hear the bamboos talk. The avenue was like a market full of softly
chattering women, swept by a subject they loved, and to which each made
a separate but simultaneous contribution. Looking up through the broken
ceiling of leaves, Lucy saw a flock of jade-green parakeets as small as
a child’s fingers. Their heads and breasts were rose-colored, and their
close-knit wings had a short fluttering movement, so that they looked
like leaves transmuted into birds. Each bird slipped in and out of the
light foliage on a separate errand, yet the same instinct united them,
and they looked like a company of lovers on an excursion together. “Oh,
Myra,” Lucy exclaimed, “how beautiful!”

Myra made no answer, and Lucy, glancing at her, found that she was in
tears. She held her big clumsy hands tightly together as if to keep
herself quiet, though her sobs shook her. Lucy laid her hand on Myra’s
heavy hands, they felt very cold and trembled under her touch. “It was
wrong of me to bring you into this lovely place,” Lucy said in quick
self-reproach. “I know how it makes you cry when the person you love
can’t see the same thing too.”

Myra’s oblique eyes fixed themselves, full of dread, on Lucy’s small
white hand as if it had the power to freeze her heart. She made a great
effort and controlled the sobs that shook her. “Please forgive me,” she
said, “it is not altogether Whiteleaf that has made me cry. It is also
Philip. I am so sorry for Philip.”

“Yes, I know,” Lucy murmured. “He too has lost a friend, perhaps the
best he had. I know we can’t help him yet, but perhaps one day we _may_
help him. I too will be his friend as I am yours.”

“It is partly for that I cry,” Myra unexpectedly explained. “You see,
three women love Philip and none of their love is any good to him. It is
all such waste—not happy like those birds. Whiteleaf loves him and she
will never see him again. She told me this. If she has children they
must be Communist children. You love him—I feel it in my heart—but
Philip dare not love you because you are white, and he will never love
me because I am so ugly, so we can never make beauty for Philip and
Philip needs it—for it is his work to be all day long with pain and
ugliness.”

Lucy was aghast. She was not only appalled that Myra had read her
secret—a secret which she herself had not yet fully accepted—but she
was horrified to think of the child’s own misfortune in loving Philip in
vain, and beyond this distress lay a deep astonishment that Myra should
doubt Lucy’s ability to make Philip happy by her love.

“My dear,” she said at last, “I had never thought of you—though you are
so wise—as old enough to have your heart broken. But you mustn’t think
you can’t be loved. Why, how easy it has been to love you—for Whiteleaf
and for me, and of course for Philip, though like me he has thought of
you only as a child.”

“I am nearly sixteen,” Myra reminded Lucy with dignity. “And Juliet was
only fourteen when she pushed the dagger deep enough into her heart to
kill herself and said: ‘This is thy sheathe; there rust and let me die.’
You see, like me, Juliet did not want to live without Romeo.” For a long
time they sat in silence hand in hand. The parakeets, encouraged by
their stillness, broke into a thread of song, playing with the leaves
that sprang back under their resilient weight. Suddenly the little flock
broke through the wavering leaf barrier and lost themselves in sunshine.

Myra spoke then. “I did not want to disturb them,” she said. “It is nice
to think there is another world that does not belong to us, and
where—unless we make it—there is so little pain. I do not only cry
because we shall never, any of us, have Philip. Perhaps Juliet minded
most that Romeo too had killed himself for pain. That may have been the
real reason why she liked the dagger so much. Not just because she found
her own joy dead as well.”

“But, Myra, Myra, my dear,” Lucy said urgently, “I _will_ try to make
Philip happy. I am quite _sure_—whatever difficulties there are—that I
can in the end make him happy.”

“Oh, yes,” said Myra sadly, “you have a terrible power, but perhaps you
do not know all about us poor colored people to whom you are so kind.
And it may not have occurred to you that kindness is terrible to a
lover. How can Philip bear it? He wants to give you the whole world—he
does not want to take it from you! Besides, I think you still do not
know what we feel here on the Island about—white people. Your hand lies
here on mine, and it is white. Please do not take it away, but do not
forget either that I must learn not to hate white hands.”

“Oh, Myra,” Lucy cried, “do you really mean that Philip could _mind_ my
being white? Why, I never think for an instant about his color. He is so
handsome—his color to me is no more than sunburn. If what you say is
true, I must get sunburned too.”

“Yes—but it is _not_ sunburn,” Myra said inexorably, “it is his skin,
and yours is white. Lucy, how strong your heart must be if your love can
conquer the hate in Philip, which we all feel. Here for two hundred
years we have been your slaves. My mother’s blood is in me as well as my
father’s—and sometimes it speaks to me. No one can bear to be a slave
to anyone else. Above all not a slave to people who think they are
better because they are different while we are only different and no
worse.”

“You mean,” Lucy said after a long pause, “that I must give up liking to
be white? I must live in some other way?”

“Yes,” said Myra. “If you marry Philip there will be nothing more for
you but Philip and the Island—and if there is, Philip will hate you or
he will die. He may prefer to die.”

“You cannot possibly be sixteen—you must be sixty,” Lucy said, trying
to laugh, “and I must be a little girl with all her lessons still
unlearned!”

“You are the headmistress of Everslade,” Myra said, without an answering
smile, though she had long ago stopped crying, “and I am your pupil.”
Myra seemed to think their talk was over, for she started up the car and
the bamboos slowly relinquished them. The sun struck down hot and
relentless, with the pressure of a hand upon their necks. Neither of
them spoke again as the car protestingly climbed the long hill back to
Everslade.

As they stopped before the gate, Lucy asked hesitantly, “Myra—do you
yourself feel this—hatred for me?”

“Not often,” Myra replied promptly, “only if I think you will hurt
Philip more than he has been hurt already, and even then it is not you
whom I hate—you I love—it is the feeling of your whiteness. I think it
may do something that cannot be stopped. My father says white people
have too much will—they do not let life do what it can. Perhaps that is
what I fear. You gave me the words for it that day I first loved you. I
thought perhaps that man in the poem ‘who turned no more his head’ was
like me, ‘because he knew a frightful fiend did close behind him tread.’
He guessed that white people would take away from him all that he
had—even his life—if he looked round—and yet perhaps he may have
admired the figure behind him too. There can be beautiful fiends.”




                             _CHAPTER XXV_


The staff sat on the big veranda playing bridge like slow-motion figures
on a film, while Lucy approached them unseen, across the darkened
terrace. Elvira dealt with her usual rapid skill, the cards drifting
from her crimson-tipped fingers toward the players for whom they were
destined with uncanny precision.

Lucy would have said, after the daily intimacy of ten months under the
same roof, that she knew what each of her teachers looked like
relentlessly well, but tonight she saw them again as if for the first
time. Perhaps they looked so different because they could not see Lucy
and were just a little more like themselves without her presence, but
perhaps, too, Lucy saw them differently because her eyes had just been
sharpened to a deeper sense of human relationship. Between Philip and
his mother there existed an intimacy that dispensed with daily habits
and penetrated unseen like the flow of blood. There was not only the
bond between mother and son, but a secret depth of understanding that is
born in all long-humiliated peoples.

Those who have been allowed no part in the common heritage of man must
sink their shafts far deeper into private intimacy. The whole world of
human understanding rests upon each other’s hearts. No fresh habit
alters it, no accident of human behavior stupefies it. As the mother and
son walked up the garden path together, heavy with the loss of
Whiteleaf, Lucy had felt herself outside a wall which she could never
climb. Now she asked herself, “How well do I really know my teachers
when they look so different when I am not there?”

Miss Lestrange sat in a corner reading till the nine o’clock news came
on. She would have preferred to be alone in her own room, but her
conscience did not allow her to rest until she had taken to bed with her
an irksome sketch of the follies of mankind. She was less aware of Lucy
as a factor in her inner life than she had been on their first meeting.
It had been important then for Miss Lestrange to discover what obstacle
or what relief Lucy’s arrival might present, but once Miss Lestrange saw
that she could pursue her narrow pathway toward her goal unhindered by
Lucy, she had withdrawn her entire attention from her. “Now,” Lucy
thought to herself, “I might be dead at her feet for all she cares!” Her
eyes traveled more hopefully toward the younger and more responsive
spirits of the two Myers sisters. Certainly they considered Lucy with a
deeper ease, since they had worked together. They were both good workers
and appreciated Lucy’s letting them do their work in their own way.
Rebecca didn’t—and never would—like Lucy. She still made a point of
accepting her duties as grievances, but she was a good teacher and only
as rude to Lucy as she felt Lucy could bear. Something always checked
her from being quite unbearable, though there were times when Lucy
wished it wouldn’t, and that they might both have the relief of a
torn-down row.

Naomi had grown to like Lucy enough for Lucy to be pleasantly aware of
her rather than unpleasantly, but contact between them had been
superficial, since Naomi only came across to Everslade in her free time.

Lucy’s eyes passed from the two sisters playing opposite each other to
Nancy Peck’s alert, substantial form. Whatever danger there might be,
Lucy thought, here was an unswerving ally. Nancy Peck was both satisfied
with Lucy and loyal in her satisfaction, but she was loyal as a
subordinate is loyal, she was not a friend. It was to Elvira that Lucy
looked for that kindred spark in another human being which deepens the
joy of living.

“Anyhow, I’m not really frightened,” Lucy told herself. “I only
pretended to Philip I was because if I hadn’t he wouldn’t have seen me
again. Besides, it couldn’t be Elvira—it’s unthinkable.”

It wasn’t, perhaps, very fair to Philip to stress a danger Lucy had
ceased to believe in, but then it wasn’t very fair of Philip either to
insist on giving her up, when neither of them wanted it. Fairness, where
the stakes are highest, has not yet been assimilated by most human
beings. It was this fact perhaps that made it possible for Lucy to be a
good deal fairer to Elvira than she had been to Philip.

Elvira caught the sound of Lucy’s approaching footsteps. Her dark,
gleaming eyes shone with instant welcome. “Lucy,” she cried, “wherever
have you been? I was getting nervous about you.”

“Nowhere in particular,” Lucy found herself saying. “It’s so queer and
hot today, I just took the car out for a run to get a little air.” It
would have been easy to say, “I went to ask Mrs. Calgary if she knew
more about Whiteleaf’s abrupt departure.” Yet Lucy found that she hadn’t
said it.

“Come and join us,” Elvira entreated. “Our rubber is just over. One of
us will cut out and then you can cut in.” Lucy agreed and cut in, and
Naomi cut out.

“I hope you won’t mind,” Elvira said with the deferential affection she
always used in speaking to Lucy in public, instead of the affectionate
freedom—perhaps a little deferential too—with which she treated Lucy
when they were alone, “but I gave Myra O’San leave to go back with her
father for the night. He called to see her quite unexpectedly this
afternoon by car, and although I knew it would mean her missing most of
tomorrow’s work, I thought the poor child so upset over Whiteleaf that
she would be the better for a change.”

There was a queer little silence before Lucy spoke to voice her
agreement. Nancy Peck paused in her deal, Naomi, who to Miss Lestrange’s
unconcealed annoyance was fiddling with a knob on the radio, took her
hand suddenly away from it. It was like the pause Lucy remembered on the
day of her arrival when she had wanted to meet the girls sooner than
Elvira had intended. On that first occasion all of them had been sitting
where they sat now, including Whiteleaf. Now the only difference was the
absence of Whiteleaf. Yet to Lucy the erect, significant little figure
had never been more present. The phrases in Whiteleaf’s letter leaped
into her mind as audibly as any spoken word. “You have the same enemies.
Do not let them separate her from you.” But they _were_ separated. This
time Lucy could not ask if there wasn’t a bell that could be rung, there
was no use making any sound at all. She took up her cards and sorted
them and the pause was over.

Elvira was a skilled bridge player, although she had the weakness,
common to many skilled players, of slightly overcalling her hand.

Rebecca, who was Elvira’s partner, played a nervous, uncertain game with
flashes of brilliance. Nancy’s play never varied. She played to the
certain value of her cards and toward the probable value of her
partner’s. As a partner she had no surprises beyond the fact that unlike
most partners she never made an inconsiderate mistake.

Nancy was not quite up to Elvira’s form, but a better player than Lucy,
who was in her turn never as erratic as Rebecca, so that the four were
evenly matched. They played an exciting rubber just won by a startlingly
intelligent bid of Elvira’s, carried out with masterly skill.

“I don’t really see how she _could_ win with those cards,” Lucy thought,
“but I don’t quite see where we could have stopped her either.”

Adassa came in with a tray of drinks. Elvira and Nancy took gin and
lime, Naomi and Rebecca drank orange juice by itself, and Lucy had a
fresh lime squash.

Just as Lucy was about to drink hers Nancy made a clumsy movement,
pushing Lucy’s glass on to the floor, where it smashed to atoms. She
apologized profusely and ran indoors to get Lucy another drink. Elvira
said lightly, “How incredibly clumsy our Nancy can be!” But _could_ she,
Lucy suddenly asked herself. Was Nancy ever clumsy, Nancy who was so
proficient in every form of manual dexterity that no one ever asked for
her help with the inanimate in vain? Lucy could never remember seeing
Nancy fall over, or upset anything. It was so curious an incident that
after they had all gone up to bed Lucy called to Nancy across the
balcony and asked her to come over.

Nancy came from her room next door, in a stream of light, smiling as if
nothing had happened except an agreeable rubber.

“Wasn’t that a good game?” she asked Lucy. “But somehow or other I think
we ought to have won that last rubber.”

“I felt just the same,” Lucy admitted. “Elvira is really a most smashing
player.”

“She is all that,” agreed Nancy.

There was a little pause before Lucy said in a lower voice, “I know it’s
silly to ask such a question—anyone _can_ upset a glass—but, Nancy,
did you, by any chance, _mean_ to upset mine?”

The smile on Nancy’s face vanished. Her eyes had a startled, hunted
look. She moved closer to Lucy, as if she were listening to something,
before she answered, “I just upset it—to make sure. After all, you are
the only one of us who takes lime juice by itself. I don’t say it wasn’t
quite all right. Only—Myra didn’t want to go back with her father this
afternoon.”

“Didn’t want—” Lucy began, “but why?” She broke off in sheer
astonishment. “I thought she adored her father.”

“So she does,” Nancy replied, licking her lips as if they were dry.
“Still, she wanted to stay here tonight all the same—wanted to enough
to say so very distinctly. She’s an odd child. In the end, of course,
she had to go. Elvira just sent her and it seemed all right then. But it
was what made me upset your glass.”

“Oh, no!” Lucy said after a shocked pause. “It must have been a
coincidence. It couldn’t be Elvira. I couldn’t possibly _believe_ she
could want to _poison_ me, Nancy.”

“No—I don’t suppose you could,” Nancy said with a queer little sigh.
“As a matter of fact, Margorie Fielding fixes our drinks. She knows just
how Elvira likes hers.”

“And does Myra fix mine?” Lucy inquired. “I thought evening drinks were
Adassa’s job, anyhow.”

“No. Elvira never lets Adassa touch spirits,” Nancy explained. “The
older girls like doing it for us. You know you allow them to stay up for
the evening news if they choose. Well, as a matter of fact only Margorie
and Myra care much about world affairs, so they always fix the drinks.
Margorie is allowed the cellar key. It’s quite safe really—they both
hate alcohol.”

“I see,” Lucy said a little grimly, after a long pause. “It’s wonderful
what a lot of important things about a school a headmistress doesn’t
know. But do you really think Margorie Fielding hates me as much as
that? Would she really try to poison me? Think what it means! I had
hoped she had got over that disappointed loyalty of hers.”

“I wouldn’t say people get over things at all quickly on this Island,”
Nancy said. “There’s so little going on—except what _is_ going on—if
you know what I mean. We’re all rather mixed up, and perhaps we both
exaggerate. There may have been nothing in your drink, or it may only
have been dope, _not_ poison. She might just have wanted you not to know
what was going on for an hour or two.”

“Then you think, anything that oughtn’t to _does_ go on—in spite of
Petronella and Angela having gone?” Lucy asked anxiously. Nancy made no
immediate answer. Her eyes had a glazed, secret look, as if she wanted
Lucy not to read anything from them. The silence pressed down upon them
both like a lid.

At last Nancy whispered, “That’s just it. I don’t know anything for
certain. Nor does Myra. If I _did_ know anything, of course, I’d tell
you—but now—now I don’t think it’s any good our talking about it, the
great thing is not to _seem_ to know anything, then nobody’ll get
frightened and start doing things. We just have to remember there
_might_ be something wrong.”

“But if there _is_, I want to know what it is or what it _may_ be,” Lucy
urged, but she found herself alone on the balcony. Nancy had gone.

The blackness of the night was without mitigation. Neither moon nor
stars penetrated the smoldering clouds. The light from Nancy’s open
doorway clicked off. Lucy felt as if she stood alone in a box of
unilluminated space. It was a terrifying sensation. A sudden draft of
air blew a dry leaf against a bough with a scraping sound and then the
silence settled down again heavier than before.




                             _CHAPTER XXVI_


All night long the faces of Philip and his mother floated before Lucy’s
eyes, while little gusts of wind spoke from the garden as if the voice
of the Island itself, roused from its night silence, added a warning
note to her own fears.

A child like Philip’s mother with that inscrutable masklike
quality—broad African features and heavy lips—a face that belonged to
buried history, to an unexcavated and forgotten past, and yet was
indelible in its descendants, or a beautiful child—with Philip’s
darkness perhaps but with his clear-cut beauty or her own? Which could
it be? What heritage had Lucy to offer to this child of the future?

Lucy tried to be reasonable in her thoughts. She reminded herself that
statistics had proved that a child of mixed parentage was lighter than
his dark parent and darker than his light parent, but suppose the child
“defied auguries”? What comfort had she had to give Myra for the heavy
brown face half molded by her African descent, in which was strangely
set unmistakable Chinese eyes and Asiatic features?

Lucy sprang from her bed and stared at her own face in the mirror. Her
throat and arms gleamed white as milk, the faint rose color of her
cheeks was semitransparent like fine porcelain, her eyes, inescapably
blue, stared back at her. “There can be beautiful fiends,” Myra had told
her. Was this the part Lucy had intended to play, she who had come to
give the best she possessed to this far Island? And if she gave even
this—gave her clear-skinned white body into the dark stream of the
Island’s life—what good would come of it? What bitterness might not mar
the fate of her children or her lover? A gust of sudden, heated wind
drove her hair across her eyes and Lucy was glad not to see any more
what she was looking at. She turned away to face the hot darkness of the
balcony. She was still quite safe. Philip would make no movement toward
her. His tortured arrogance was without claims. The barriers behind
which he held his heart a prisoner would hold firm unless her own hands
tore them down. And if she did this would she not be violating something
as sacred to him as her own honor was to her? Or would she instead be
releasing his splendid spirit from a bitter weakness forced on him as
his sole defense against the cruel prejudice and snobbery of the white
race, which had trained him to value what it would not let him share?
Philip was a citizen of her own country, and during the years of its
direct peril he had served Great Britain with the same courage and ardor
as Lucy herself had served it. Upon his own island no one doubted and
everyone made use of his skill and integrity. No child of his need have
a mean heritage or hang his head for what his father gave him. Yet
_should_ one of us be dark and one of us be white remained to Lucy still
an unanswered question.

It was a curious night. Between the uneasy pantings of the wind the
stillness was as intense as if the whole Island was listening. The
breeze sprang up from nowhere and dropped back upon itself, leaving the
Island out of breath and stricken with silence.

No message came from the dense blackness of the night. The Island might
have been a shadow cast by a wave, or a cloud stooping from its place in
the heavens. Thousands of miles away from any other land, it hung as
vulnerable and insignificant as a dry leaf.

Lucy reminded herself that nearly two million people lived upon the
Island at the mercy of the elements. Was there going to be an
earthquake, and would all their activities of living, and her own tiny
personal problems with it, come to pieces as suddenly as a bombed house
falls? Very slowly as she stood there she became aware that the darkness
was less dense. The trees massed themselves together, no longer a part
of the sky; gradually each separate feature of the garden stood out, a
shadowy entity.

The sky loosened its black pall, and a light, preceding color, broke
across the horizon. Far below the terrace the plain lay like a dropped
cloak, stretched out between the mountains and the sea.

Suddenly across the clear space of sky a great sheet of birds shot
toward the mountains, rocketing and swirling like planes in an air
battle, and yet keeping their supple and pliant formation in an
incredible symmetry. Nothing hunted them, yet the whole sky was full of
panic-driven fugitives, birds of all kinds and sizes were intricately
bound in the same ordered mass. Zigzagging and suddenly dropping from
level to level of the baseless air, they kept intact their wing-to-wing
formation till, swirling over Lucy’s head, they vanished behind the
mountains. The wind fell, no leaf stirred. The dawn carried on its
unhurried processes.

Lucy had hardly time to think what this sudden eruption of terrified
birds foretold when she heard the telephone bell jangling in the room
behind her. Philip’s deep, controlled voice said, “Calgary speaking—is
that Mrs. Armstrong?”

“Yes—yes, Philip,” Lucy stammered.

“There is a hurricane warning.” There was a moment’s pause before
Philip’s voice went on a hint less smoothly. “It may strike your way.
You should have an hour’s grace. It would be best to send the entire
school at once to the MacTaggerts’ mission on the lee side of the
Island. They are expecting you. Leave the sick children with the
Brigadier at the Gap before you cross the pass. You should be safely
over by the time it strikes. Some trustworthy person must stay with
Henriette. Carry her by stretcher into Everslade. Close the house
according to the formula you have learned. I cannot leave the
hospital—good-by, Lucy.” The telephone went dead before she had time to
answer him.

For a moment she stood motionless, possessed by Philip’s voice. It
seemed to speak out of her heart as if an act of union had taken place
between them and they were already one.

All that she had learned about hurricanes came flooding back to Lucy
effortlessly, and with an odd sense of exultation. For such emergencies
she had been fully trained. She gave one glance toward the sky. The day
was upon them, sulphur-colored and gray, wholly devoid of beauty; then
with unhurried precision, skilled as the flying birds, Lucy began to
carry out her plans.




                            _CHAPTER XXVII_


Within half an hour every teacher was ready and instructed, every child
marshaled and controlled. The annex children had already left for the
Gap, driven by Naomi in Lucy’s car. Each teacher was responsible for her
own group of children and assisted by a few of the more reliable older
girls.

The servants scattered precipitately, screaming like tropical birds, to
their own homes. Henriette had been transferred to the safest back room
at Everslade. Lucy stood by the gate and watched the last child file out
onto the bridle path across the mountains, until the woods swallowed
them.

Lucy was alone. The Great house, the whole hillside was empty. The wind
pouring steadily in from the sea had not yet reached gale force, but the
trees already swept their foliage toward the hills, bending all one way
in fearful homage, as if a throne had suddenly become occupied by an
invisible god. Lucy slowly returned across the terrace to the house.

All the hurricane instructions had been carried out. The whole front and
sides of the house were closely barred and shuttered, while the back
windows on the lee side remained open. When she had closed and bolted
the great door after her the house behind her became a fortress. She had
let no one stay behind to keep her company. The quick safety of the
school had been her only thought. In an hour the children should be
across the pass and in comparative security. In half an hour the
Brigadier had promised to ring up to tell her if the sick children had
arrived. Meanwhile he had ordered an empty isolation ward in the
military hospital made ready to receive them. There should just be time,
Lucy told herself, to make some coffee for Henriette and herself. Her
whole body listened for the wind, but there was as yet no increase in
its volume.

Henriette, used to the other girls going off on their excursions, was
enchanted by her change of quarters and Lucy’s single companionship.
They drank their coffee made in the French way, and ate rolls and butter
as if they were on a picnic. The classroom door stood wide open toward a
peak swept clean of cloud. Trees and bushes streamed at their roots as
if for the first time afraid of their tethered existence. Every leaf
danced and quivered in the harsh sulphur-colored light with a separate,
uneasy motion.

The big clock in the kitchen ticked as if time were moving, and yet Lucy
thought the intractable minute hand made no perceptible progress. She
washed up the breakfast things and turned on the radio to get a further
report, but something had gone wrong with the radio; after giving vent
to a racket of strange sounds, it went off altogether.

At last the telephone rang in the kitchen next door. The annex children
were safe. The Brigadier warned Lucy that she might not get any more
messages, the wires would soon be down. Yet a few moments later one
message more came through from Bob, anxious, helpless, furious to reach
her, but unable to cross the entire length of the Island before the
hurricane struck. He was still expostulating, warning and explaining,
when his voice checked into silence.

With an unearthly shriek the first blast struck the mountain. “It’s only
a hurricane,” Lucy found herself saying reassuringly, with shaking lips,
to Henriette’s white lifted face. “Only a hurricane, darling. It isn’t
wild animals. The sea can’t reach us here. It’s only a big, empty wind!”
But was it empty? The air streaming by on both sides of the house
carried with incredible velocity a broken forest of blossoms, twigs,
boughs, flying particles of anything that had dared to stand for an
instant in its invisible pathway.

While they clung together, gazing with astonished eyes, the annex roof
lifted like a pocket handkerchief into the air, floated above the trees
for an instant, and sailed out of sight.

“Why, it’s gone—Lucy, it’s gone!” cried the terrified child. “All our
home has gone into the sky!”

“Yes! Yes! But such a little roof,” Lucy submitted, “such a little house
to stand against a storm. Here in this big house we are very safe.” Even
as she spoke the entire house rose, shook itself, and settled down
again. But perhaps, Lucy thought, only as a bird settles, poised for
further flight.

The howling of the wind was a fearful sound; not all the shrieks of all
the fierce animals in the world could sound more savage. The wind beat
continuously, irresistibly upon the tortured earth. Trees snapped short
beneath its flail, or with lingering agony dragged themselves up by the
roots, their final death cry lost in the gale.

Henriette, seeing that nothing in the room had changed, slowly lost her
fear. The outer world became a fascinating spectacle. Absorbed, she
watched, identifying her imprisoned body with the wild tossing of every
light and yielding tree. Only when the tree couldn’t move fast enough,
and she saw that it was doomed, did her eyes grow large with horror,
while the tree wrestling with the storm was flung ruthlessly from side
to side, till with a final shriek, no longer able to withstand the
savage pressure, the whole tree, roots and all, shot up into the air and
vanished out of sight. For three minutes and a half there was sheer
pandemonium. Whatever was in the sky seemed determined to make an end of
the Island. The earth shook, the walls quivered, the house cried and
swayed like a shaken child, and as suddenly an awful pause followed.
Slowly surviving trees righted themselves, the house was still, the air
was for a moment clear and empty, then once more, with a leap, the
hurricane burst into louder clamor. The shattering force of the first
onslaught was past, but the tearing, rollicking force of the gale
remained.

“The worst is over,” Lucy kept repeating to the child. Henriette sank
back exhausted. She could watch and think no more, even her breath
seemed to have failed her.

For a long while Lucy did not dare to leave the child. At last, worn out
by terror, Henriette slept. Very lightly, Lucy left the room. It took
all her strength to push open the door that led to the front of the
house. In spite of closed shutters, the wind had filtered through into
the front rooms and tore up and down the passages. Doors had been blown
open and banged with senseless reiteration. It was useless to try to
keep them shut. Pictures were blown off the walls, vases lay smashed on
the floor, furniture slid about the room as if it were in a ship on a
stormy sea.

One of the balconies had been ripped off, but the roof was still intact.
The bars across the shutters had been bent but none of them had broken.
Everslade was a buttressed and solidly built Victorian house; it had
already survived many hurricanes, and Lucy believed that it would
survive this one. She crept back, a little comforted, into the sheltered
room. When she looked at the clock she saw with dismay that the storm
was only an hour old.

It seemed unimaginable that so much terror, so much noise and fury,
could have been concentrated into one short hour. How much longer could
any building endure the ceaseless battering of the storm?

The worst raid Lucy had ever been in was less organic than this steady
disruption of the earth itself by an unseen agent. Hurricanes could go
on, Lucy remembered, for three days at a time, and they did not seem to
get very much less terrible.

Had Elvira and Nancy been able to keep control of their frightened
charges? Even if they got over the pass in time to escape the worst
onslaught the way to the mission would be a long, arduous tussle. Would
the children’s strength hold out—would their teachers make their orders
obeyed implicitly and with good will?

Elvira, directly she had grasped that she was to lead and control the
expedition, had replaced the blank terror in her face with eager
determination. As for Nancy, she had taken in what was expected of her
and acted upon it, in less time than Lucy took to tell her. Miss
Lestrange had accepted the news with her usual stoicism; she simply
didn’t mind what might happen more than she minded what usually
happened. This, Lucy thought, was the most that could be expected of
her, but was it enough? Rebecca, more cowed by Elvira than by the storm,
had been afraid to show her fear, and Margorie Fielding had behaved
instantly like the soldier’s daughter that she was. They had no invalids
and only three miles of path to follow before they crossed the pass;
once over, the peak would shelter them. They had had fifty-five minutes
before the storm had struck to do it in. It was a race, but the decision
had been Philip’s, not hers. Philip had not thought the school should
remain at Everslade. Philip, then, had not thought that Everslade was
safe. He had not known, but he would perhaps have guessed, that Lucy
herself would remain with Henriette. He would not, though, have supposed
that no one else would have stayed with her. He would have counted upon
Myra. Lucy must not even let herself think what a tremendous asset
Myra’s presence would have been. Elvira’s hand had loosened the strong
rope of that safety. But of course she had not meant to loosen it. The
hurricane, at any rate, was not Elvira’s fault. Lucy was alone with an
act of God. Well! Now she would find out the strength of her religion.

She was not responsible for the consequences that might befall. She had
no orders to give, no dangerous acts to perform, no hierarchy of
disciplined authority behind her expectant of her courageous services.
She was not a heroine any more. Just a girl with a sick child in the
house, at the mercy of the elements. There was nothing that could be
done about a hurricane. She must go on sitting in this room with a clock
that hardly moved and a frightened child. The walls might cave in at any
moment, the ceiling might be ripped off overhead. The electricity had
already ceased to function, but she had candles and there was still a
good deal of daylight. There was food enough in the larder to last them
for a week or more. Perhaps before nightfall the wind might die down.
She must not let any more wind get into the front part of the house if
she could help it. She must go at once, while there was still light
enough over that strange, disheveled no-man’s-land under the shrieking
attics, and see what harm the wind had done—and still might do.

Henriette woke and whispered, “Isn’t it over, Lucy?” and began to
whimper a little, hearing once more the pummeling sound of the wind
against the walls, and the shrieks from distant passages, where the wind
ran to and fro like an angry dog. “Not quite over,” Lucy reassured her,
“but I think a good deal less. We’ll have a meal now. I’ll tell you what
is in the larder and you shall choose just what you like to eat.”
Henriette, however, said that she wouldn’t like anything to eat and
didn’t want Lucy to go into the kitchen. Lucy skillfully moved
Henriette’s bed nearer the open door so that she could watch Lucy’s
every movement and make suggestions, and when Lucy had cooked it they
both found the meal a great comfort and felt much better after it. The
clock, too, had actually moved forward. When everything was washed up
and tidied again, it was already afternoon.

Lucy said she wanted to go to sleep and lay down beside Henriette, who
finally did go to sleep. Lucy lay beside her, her eyes roving from
window to window, but none of them showed anything new, only the little
trees, low and supple, sweeping themselves to the ground and then
flinging themselves frantically upward as if even their humility could
be used against them. The blue ridge of mountains had a hard, strange
color in the ugly shuttered light, but at any rate the peaks stood
still. At four o’clock, when daylight began to wane, Lucy crept away
from the sleeping child and once more roamed the quaking house.
Everything was in the same disordered shifting condition, yet no new
damage had occurred. Sudden squalls of rain joining themselves with the
fierce air now flung themselves against walls and windows with the
flattened weight of water. New blows, new retreats added themselves to
the hours; while every now and then there was a strange uneasy drop in
sound, as if the forces at war with the Island had withdrawn among
themselves, to take further counsel how to destroy it.

You could go on being frightened, Lucy told herself, for just so long,
then fear dulled down into monotony. Lucy knew all the facts. She knew
what would happen if the roof went, if the walls caved in, if one of the
huge, massive shutters was broken back—the glass smashed and the wind
coming through. The house could not stand any more wind than that which
was already in it. The child was light. Lucy could carry her, but where
could she carry her to? She could not move against a wall of wind. She
could hold the child in her arms and cover her with her own body, and
then let death blow them where it liked. Where human responsibility
ends, so does fear. Whatever had to be done, Lucy told herself, would be
provided for by the danger itself.

There was no malice in the elements. They did not hate Lucy and
Henriette more than they hated the stones that rattled past the windows,
or the trees gouged up out of the earth itself. Nature acts ruthlessly
but without spite.

It was much more terrible to think of what might happen to Philip. His
hospital was within a few hundred yards of a great open bay. There was
nothing between it and the full force of the hurricane. The hospital was
a ramshackle wooden building, a tidal wave would make short work of what
the wind left. There were three hundred sick people in it and not one of
them that Philip would not put before himself, so that Lucy knew he had
three hundred chances less than any of them.

She found it harder than ever to close the door against the shrieking
house. Henriette said in a small, unhappy voice, “Lucy! It sounds louder
now it is darker. Can you sing to me, please?” Lucy lit candles and sang
to her all the nursery rhymes she could think of and all the little
light French songs.

There was no difference in the force of the wind, it raged and sobbed as
if all the lost souls of unrecorded time had come trooping back to the
earth and only could not get in because the door was shut.

Lucy got supper and sang more songs, till Henriette slept at last, her
head against Lucy’s heart. It was still only eight o’clock. Fourteen
hours since Lucy had heard Philip’s voice. She wondered if she would
ever hear his voice again.

The wind had risen with the dark. The house shook more, the candle
flickered to an end, while Lucy watched it.

It was curious to think what happened between the flame and the dark.




                            _CHAPTER XXVIII_


Lucy was glad that at nightfall she had shut and barred even the windows
uninvaded by the wind. She felt stalked by shadows. The big classroom
flickered in the light of two small candles as if nothing in it was
solid any more. In the front of the house doors banged and shutters
rattled, bursts of insane laughter filled the long passages, and through
every crack and cranny the wind howled like a pack of hunger-driven
animals in pursuit of prey. It was hard to believe the flimsy defenses
of walls could withstand the tremendous force and pressure of the storm.
The sleeping child in Lucy’s arms increased her fear. The sense of
Lucy’s presence gave Henriette security enough, but her own presence
gave no defense to Lucy. She asked herself what there was in her, behind
this sick and stubborn sense of fear, that could outlast the storm? She
knew she was in mortal danger beyond the use of her own wits. Was there
then, beyond the reach of danger, no inner citadel? Was defeat the core
of disaster? Lucy tried to pray. The closely constructed clauses of the
Lord’s Prayer stumbled through her tired brain as if the wind had broken
their cohesion. Was there a Father behind all this insensate disorder?
Did she want His will to be done if it meant, for herself and Henriette,
destruction in a hideous storm of terror? What bread was worth Lucy’s
asking for? What trespasses mattered, forgiven or unforgiven? Only the
last uncertain clause of this strange prayer, “Deliver us from evil,”
voiced her real need. These words went on and on in her head without
stilling the rising panic in her heart. There was God or Nothing and
moment by moment each wore the face of the other.

Suddenly all sounds ceased. They had reached the strange whirlpool of
silence at the heart of the hurricane where sound leaps at the throat of
sound. Henriette woke more frightened than before, crying, “Lucy, what
is it? What is it?” in a frenzy of terror and Lucy did not know how to
comfort her.

Someone knocked at the kitchen door. They clung together speechless and
trembling—as if this little sound was the most terrible that they had
yet endured. At last Lucy summoned courage to open the window and face
the wall of darkness. A slightly shrill but very familiar and friendly
voice greeted her. “My father and I are here,” Myra called out.

Lucy rushed to the door, tears of relief streaming down her face. “How
did you ever get here?” she stammered as the two drenched figures
stepped past her into the kitchen.

“Before the wind came we took the car,” Myra explained, “and when it
struck us we ran into the woods. There you can see what the wind carries
and the trees hide you. We guessed it was you who would stay alone with
Henriette.” Myra swayed as she stood and Lucy caught her in her arms.

“The child is tired,” Mr. O’San announced calmly. “But she will not be a
care long. She only needs food and dry clothes.”

The wind returned with redoubled violence, but Lucy hardly noticed its
fresh onslaught. She ran to and fro making hot drinks and preparing
food. She fought the door into the hall open to find dry clothes and
drag down mattresses unmoved by clamor or by darkness, and all the while
she could imagine Henriette’s excited voice talking to Myra and her
father as if she too felt new faith in the order of the universe; and
yet nothing had happened to relieve them. They were in the same danger.
The house rocked and shuddered. The gale whirled on its furious pathway,
tearing up all that stood in its way. None of them knew what the sea was
doing to the low plains at its mercy far below, yet the sense of being
together was stronger than any refuge.

Dried, warmed, and fed, Myra and her father sat crosslegged on the floor
by Henriette’s mattress relating their adventures. They were bruised by
flying branches, their clothes torn, and buckets of water had been flung
at them out of the sky from every direction. What they thought was a
particularly heavy branch writhing just in front of them had turned out
to be a disturbed rock python about twelve feet long, and very unsure,
in the bustle in which it found itself, which was its head and which was
its tail. As quickly as possible they had left it to solve its dilemma,
and later on were joined by a family of mongoose and a fox; puzzled but
companionable, the animals remained with them till the edge of the wood.

“Not everything will happen to the Island,” Mr. O’San explained
reassuringly to Lucy. “This is the fifth hurricane I have known here and
yet it is much the same Island as when I first saw it. Such winds strike
only a path across the Island and destroy more trees than people. We
reached the MacTaggerts’ mission at midday and found all your children
safe. Your little ones were weary, for it was a race to get over the
pass in time, but all had arrived without injury and only when they were
quite secure did some of the older girls begin to draw attention to
themselves by the use of water power. When they began to cry or to turn
faint Mrs. MacTaggert slapped their faces in a kind, firm way and they
all recovered immediately. There was much to do at the mission, for
people from miles around came running up from the sea to take shelter
with them. Each was given a task and Mr. MacTaggert prayed with them, in
and out of his work, finding shelter for all. Such people as the
MacTaggerts make harmony out of chaos—for it is already in them. They
have created their world. They found time to feed us and we got well up
into the woods before darkness. We walked hand in hand, bent double, so
as not to lose each other or blow over easily. As long as it was light
we could see the trees break and the branches fly, and so fall on our
faces to avoid them. When darkness came we had torches. But all this
took time. We should have been here before. I see now that it is already
three o’clock. Upon these mattresses which you have so kindly spread out
for us, we can sleep well.”

Wrapped in the biggest dressing gown Lucy had been able to secure for
him, Mr. O’San seemed to have stepped out of a Chinese print of a sage
sitting under a pine tree or a waterfall. He did not need these or any
other objects, however, to be at home wherever he found himself. His
narrow eyes, reddened with fatigue and strain, glinted with laughter. He
was a small, wiry man, with none of Myra’s clumsiness, but in them both
was the same calm stoicism and undeflectable loyalty. Anything might
happen to them and a good deal already had, but for them “despair itself
was mild.”

“There is no tidal wave yet,” Myra remarked, suddenly, her eyes meeting
Lucy’s. “In the hospital the sick that could be moved are moved. Philip
stays with the rest.”

“People live better through hurricanes than through earthquakes,” Mr.
O’San added cheerfully. “The houses are frail and fall easily without
crushing their inhabitants. As for tidal waves, they knock over more
than they drown. Philip has sense. He is strong. He has lived through
hurricanes before. There are not many things you can do in a hurricane,
but what can be done he will attend to better than most people. Owing to
the good food you have given us, we shall, I think, all sleep well.”

His smile deepened as he met Henriette’s fascinated eyes.

“Shall we leave the candles lit?” Lucy found herself asking.

Henriette, who, as her confidence increased, had become at once more
dignified and more conscious of her duties as a hostess, answered with
conviction. “There is now no need for candles, Madame, since our friends
are with us. We shall sleep better without light.”




                             _CHAPTER XXIX_


It was the second night of the storm before Lucy found herself alone for
the first time with Mr. O’San. The girls slept in the big classroom side
by side. They were not used to the wind, for it varied its terrors with
every shaken hour, but they were too exhausted to keep awake for long.

“I wanted to talk to you,” Lucy said a little nervously, sitting down on
a hard kitchen chair opposite him, with the big scoured table between
them, “without the girls. It worries me why you took your life and
Myra’s in your hands—just to come here to me. I understand Philip
moving the school to the other side of the Gap, but you were already
there—yet you came—you brought her into the very teeth of the wind.”

Mr. O’San regarded Lucy’s resolute but anxious face with amused eyes.
“For pleasure we did _not_ come,” he admitted. “Philip could not reach
you—he could not leave the hospital. But other things besides storms
are dangerous, or so he thought. He was not sure when he rang up to warn
us where you would be, but Myra was sure. She said: ‘She will stay with
Henriette alone at Everslade.’ We all knew that Everslade would be in
the track of the storm. When Philip discovered that Myra was not here
with you, we understood that he would be still more disturbed, so we
said quickly, ‘We have a car, before the wind strikes we will go to
her.’ Philip answered us, ‘There is not time enough. But if you go, go
at once and take to the woods when it strikes.’ Then he rang off. His
mother he had already warned, but she is one of those who look after
themselves because they are so close to Nature that she shares her
secrets with them. We did as Philip told us, ran with our car as far as
we could, and when the wind struck, the woods hid us. Here we are. Have
we not been happy together?”

“But, Mr. O’San,” Lucy said with undiverted seriousness, “what other
danger is there besides the storm? And if there _is_ danger here at
Everslade, how could you bring Myra back into it again when she was safe
where she was?”

“Have you ever tried,” Mr. O’San demanded with a twinkle, “to stop Myra
from doing what she thinks she ought? She has the docility of a dove, my
little one, but also the slipperiness of an eel in carrying out her own
designs. Had I not come with her she would have come alone. As to
danger—other danger than the storm—it is true that Everslade is a
strong old house, but a hurricane can kill people very easily in a great
many unexpected ways, and suppose—since we are all cut off from each
other while it is going on—that a murderer should use one of these ways
to attain his object, during the hurricane? After the storm is over the
person he wanted to see dead is found dead. No one will now say he did
it—why should he? It is the result of the hurricane. So it seemed to
us, as doubtless to Philip, very advisable that you should have friends
with you during the hurricane. When some brave and kind person comes to
help you—as Adassa came at great risk to herself this afternoon, though
in the first panic she had, like the other servants, left you—she finds
a group of four people looking after each other. Her services are not
needed—in spite of the further risk of the storm and your kind
invitation, she does not stay. She goes back to weep and wail with her
relations. Very natural, very touching; they wish, she says to explain
why she does not stay in safety with us, to die together. But she may
have had other wishes. She may have had the wish to kill.”

“Adassa!” Lucy exclaimed. “Why, Mr. O’San, I thought it was so
_wonderful_ of her to come here—when she was so frightened.”

“It was too wonderful,” Mr. O’San observed with a charming smile. “We
need not all be as wonderful as that. For love, a child like Myra is so
senseless she will risk her life, and for love, an old father of one
child will also risk what still belongs to him to save her. But somebody
else’s servant, who has shown no affection over the short period of your
acquaintance with her—why should she act against reason, for your sake?
I have a belief also that I was told, perhaps by Philip, that Adassa is
an old family servant of Elvira’s. Would that predispose her to serve
you?”

Lucy still looked grave. “I think it is a mistake,” she said a little
stiffly, “one made by Whiteleaf in the first instance, to imagine that
Elvira has any connection whatever with what has happened, or threatened
to happen, here to me. Her friendship has been a very strong and helpful
part of my work here from the first.”

“From the first,” Mr. O’San repeated, his genial smile increasing.
“Friends from the first! But what, I ask myself, was this ‘first’? What
was the state of things, honored instructress of my child, before you
arrived? Miss Elvira Loring is a colored lady of great distinction who
has been pushed aside by a white committee from a part for which during
two years she has shown herself most fitted. In the past she had
perhaps—because there was this weakness in her position, that she was
not white—allowed very special privileges to a little circle of girls,
some teachers and perhaps servants. All these fell with her when the
post came to you. Any of them may resent her fall. Do you not see how
difficult it is to be quite certain what expression—or from what
source—this resentment may take in order to replace Miss Loring? This
time even the white committee might feel that it was best to overlook
her color and retain her services in control, since when she was in
control there were at least no disasters.”

Lucy’s brows drew together, they made a soft firm line across her smooth
forehead, above the startled depth of her eyes. Mr. O’San thought to
himself that she was very young, and for all her hard experiences very
innocent, to be in such a position. “That is her appeal to Philip,” he
thought to himself. “Whiteleaf could take care of herself and others.
This girl does not know of what to take care, but she too is resolute to
save others; it is only that it is a pity she does not know what to save
herself or them from. Yet to Philip this is an added attraction. He does
not care for adult women.”

“Yes, I do see what you mean,” Lucy said at last, “and I have felt
uncomfortable here, as if there were something wrong, but I’m glad you
think it needn’t be Elvira because I’m quite sure it isn’t.”

“What makes this certainty in you?” Mr. O’San asked her quizzically.
“Because she is so nice to you, perhaps? I have sometimes thought that
niceness—charm it is called—in a suppressed person, or in anyone who
has to accept a lower position in a human relationship, is suspect—a
kind of danger signal which invites disaster—before a friendship is
established by experience. We like before we know. Would it not be wiser
to learn to know before we like? Were Whiteleaf and Philip always ‘nice’
to you at first, or even my impulsive little one, Myra—was a smile what
you first saw on her face? Yet I think you know now they are all three
your friends.”

Lucy nodded. “I know,” she admitted. “They weren’t at first—I couldn’t
understand why they were so—so grave and—and Philip snubbed me. He
does still sometimes.”

“When I ask myself whether I like or am liked by anyone,” Mr. O’San
observed thoughtfully, “I do not seek for a hand to stroke my fur the
right way. For proofs of friendship I look to acts, and also at the
direction in which both partners to a friendship are moving. I find if
they move in opposite directions they cannot long be friends, and if an
act is taken against the interest of one of these parties by the other I
no longer look on this person as a friend, but as an enemy—an enemy the
more dangerous that he still pretends to be a friend. Test Elvira Loring
in this manner, honored lady, and you may be surprised at the little
this trusted friend has really done to help you take your right place in
the school. These older girls over whom she has so great an
influence—do they like you? If they do not, whose fault is it? I am
sure they are treated by you with care and consideration. I know this
because I trust Whiteleaf’s judgment and she considers you fitted for
your position.”

“Then you don’t think,” Lucy asked, her voice shaking a little, “that it
was _only_ Petronella and Angela—as I hoped? I thought now they are
gone it would be all right!”

“The English,” Mr. O’San observed, “are very fond of that expression. I
am not quite sure myself what it means. ‘All right!’ This is not a
universe in which I find such an expression applicable; a little may
sometimes be right if we take sufficient trouble to make it so, not
otherwise.”

“You have not said it _was_ Elvira,” Lucy whispered. “Did Whiteleaf
think it was?”

“Do you not yourself know what Whiteleaf thought?” Mr. O’San asked her
with a reproachful edge to his voice. “For a long time she suffered
unjustly from Elvira’s hands. After you came she suffered less. She
thought you shared her ideas about the children in the annex. She was
satisfied in her work with you. But did you try to find out _why_ she
had suffered? What this estrangement between the school and the annex
was? It would have been worth while to find that out, Mrs. Armstrong. It
would always be worth while for English people to find out what is
wrong, and not wait till what is wrong finds them out.”

Lucy took this rebuke in silence. She was not altogether happy about her
relationship with Whiteleaf. “I always admired her,” she said finally,
lifting troubled eyes to the keen ones watching her.

“That is well,” Mr. O’San said gently. “It is perhaps because of
Whiteleaf and what she thought of you that Myra and I came to be with
you in the storm. It is true that we both wanted to help Philip and knew
that he was in trouble about you, but if we had not believed you were
worth his trouble we would not have come. Whiteleaf had convinced us of
your worth.”

“Everything,” Lucy said, in a low voice, watching the shadows dance and
shake about the floor, “always comes back to Whiteleaf—even in my own
mind. I—I have sometimes wondered—did Philip love her _very, very_
much? I can imagine they were only great friends though I have been told
otherwise—that they were lovers. I wonder _which_ they were?”

“Does it make very much difference?” Mr. O’San asked. “They are both
good people—what was between them must also have been good. We cannot
divide a man’s heart from himself. They had confidence in each other but
life has drawn them apart. I think they will not meet again. Perhaps
they do not need to—they may have given each other all that was
necessary.”

“I don’t like to think she was a Communist!” Lucy said resentfully.

Mr. O’San shook his head, half in reproach and half in amusement at her
vehemence. “I think you mean,” he said, “that she would not be
considered quite so admirable if she held such a belief? Well, communism
is fresh still—it has done much harm—but in the long run if any
country can free it from the grip of gangsters and use it with
responsibility—you may live to see that it has done more good. We
cannot test the future of so great a movement; now it has got into the
hands of gangsters and is being used to bolster up an infamous police
state. We need a miracle to show us what communism may still be; this
may take place in China, and it is because she believes in this miracle
and wants to work for it that our friend has gone there. Meanwhile you
can be very sure that Whiteleaf has no belief in gangsters and that what
she accepts as a creed is—or seems to her to be—good.”

“There may have been good Nazis,” Lucy said, still a little resentfully.

“They had no useful ideas upon which to base themselves,” Mr. O’San
replied. “Peace and universal brotherhood _are_ useful ideas.
Nevertheless, such words can be as barren as old snakeskins if we do not
use them with integrity. Man has to learn that unless his means match
his measures he will be in danger of destroying what he has set out to
build.”

Lucy frowned; it seemed to her that they had come a long way from the
subject of Philip and Whiteleaf. “Philip,” she said impatiently, “anyhow
is _not_ a Communist!”

“No,” agreed Mr. O’San, “that he has often told me. He even believes
that the white race can learn to co-operate with the black. After all,
he was educated by them.”

Lucy suddenly found herself at the core of her conflict. “Don’t you
think,” she found herself asking, “that Philip—being what he is—makes
a tremendous difference—I mean to the question of our marrying? If he
ever _will_ marry me! He wants to—but he won’t. You know that, don’t
you? Well, I want to—but of course it’s horribly difficult. I mean if I
do—I must know exactly what I’m doing, mustn’t I?”

Mr. O’San’s pointed eyebrows rose, his lips moved upward as if to follow
them, yet his eyes did not smile. “Certainly,” he agreed. “You should
always know what you are doing—before you do it. In this case it means
you must marry an Island much smaller than your own, with only a
fiftieth of its population—and most of the population belonging to a
backward, undernourished, illiterate people, hardly yet evolved from a
slave heritage. This must be your home for your whole life if you marry
Philip. You will have no other.”

“It sounds terrible when you put it like that,” Lucy said doubtfully.
“But there is this to think of. In the war I knew what I wanted—it was
to win it, somehow, to work with the people I had to work with,
to—well, to die together if we had to, but not to be beaten, not to
give up—for each of us to do our share. And I still feel rather like
that now about this Island. I know it’s a difficult life and perhaps
dangerous to live among people who aren’t like my own—and who
don’t—_can’t_ like us! Most of them as you say _are_ uneducated
and—and rather terrible—but they are what the rest of us are fighting
for, aren’t they? We are fighting against the awfulness they can’t help
and which we, English people, I mean, are largely responsible for. We
made, or helped to make, the whole muddle about Hitler, didn’t we? Well
then, we made the muddle about the slaves here too—we actually
_brought_ them here—to be our slaves. It was, if anything, worse than
Hitler. We took away their rights as human beings just like he took away
the rights of the Jews. Well, now we must help to give them back—it
isn’t just enough to _free_ slaves. You have to help them to make
themselves free. The MacTaggerts are doing this and the Quakers and lots
of other white people who aren’t specially religious. Doctors, teachers,
all kinds of people, like Philip and his friends. Well, I want to be one
of them—do you think I can? You can judge better for us, than either
Philip or I can judge for ourselves. Because you’re Chinese, you aren’t
involved in our particular problem. Do you think it impossible, what I
want to give? Do you think Philip won’t be able to take it?”

Mr. O’San was now quite grave. His eyebrows came down, his lips settled
themselves into sadness. Yet when he spoke at last it was with cheerful
firmness. “Who is to set a limit to what a human being can do?” he
asked. “Explorers have discovered the poles and climbed seemingly
inaccessible mountains. There are also explorers of the soul who have
discovered continents before unknown. If you will remember that you are
marrying a man who is not basically different from yourself, and if
Philip will remember that you are not a fairy off the top of a Christmas
tree, but a normal girl—why should you not marry? This Island has
children of every color, of every shade of color. The dark seem to me to
go better with its rich beauty than the fair but the difference is
esthetic and immaterial spiritually. Many of our planters have skins
darker than those they call colored—yet they function as well as if
they had a wholly Saxon heritage. The light-colored people—or for that
matter those who are quite black—can feel equally British, if they hold
the same opinion. I am myself a pure Chinese from Canton, but I married
an African girl here, and we lived as the British-born live. There are
those who think my child Myra plain to look at, but those who look
deeper, like Whiteleaf, yourself, and Philip, consider that she is not
without beauty. She suffers a little, perhaps, because she dislikes her
own appearance, but nevertheless she enjoys life. She gives to it and
this is enough to make any human being happy.”

Mr. O’San was silent for a long time and Lucy could find no words to
answer him. After a while he got up and looked at the barometer sunk
below calculation. “It has moved a trifle,” he told her. “I feel that
tomorrow when we wake there will be less wind. I even think this may be
the last night of the storm. Soon we shall know what has happened to the
rest of our Island.”

Lucy looked anxiously into his inscrutable black eyes. She was not sure
what she saw there. It might have been sadness, in spite of the
courteous smile upon his lips, but she thought it was kindness that she
saw there, a kindness greater than his sadness.




                             _CHAPTER XXX_


Elvira hated missions, and above all other missions she hated Dr.
MacTaggert’s. She had found missionaries were not impressionable. Dr.
MacTaggert was impressed solely by the Deity and his tenderest and most
watchful attention was concentrated upon lost sheep. Nobody likes to be
noticed _as_ a lost sheep, and Elvira disliked this form of attention
more than most people.

As for Mrs. MacTaggert, it is doubtful if even the Deity impressed her.
If He came up to her expectations that was all. His creatures—including
herself—she looked upon as worms. “Oo-aye!” was Mrs. MacTaggert’s
highest form of praise. When she said this dispassionately, it meant
that she was satisfied with the act in question. When she uttered it
doubtfully, with an interrogative stress, it meant she wasn’t satisfied,
but would pass whatever had been done, expecting no better from a worm.
If she said, “Oo-aye-puir-body!” it meant that the work would have to be
done over again by Mrs. MacTaggert herself at the first favorable
opportunity. Mrs. MacTaggert had said, “Oo-aye-puir-body!” twice to
Elvira when Elvira had ostentatiously performed some service for her.

In spite of the overcrowding due to the hurricane, Mrs. MacTaggert had
given Elvira a small room with two beds in it and her own choice of a
companion. This may have been due less to a desire to enhance Elvira’s
prestige than to prevent her circulation in a panic-stricken community;
but it suited Elvira and she chose Margorie. Any of the other girls
would have been easier to trick and would have given Elvira what she
liked most, the small change of devotion, but they wouldn’t have kept
their mouths shut. Margorie would have made the most confirmed sadist of
the Gestapo sing small. She retreated at will into some obscure fastness
of the soul where nothing could touch her. Stones cannot be easily
violated and it was into a stone that Margorie turned herself at any
approach which she resented. Even Elvira sometimes felt afraid of the
child who loved her with so austere a passion.

“Margorie,” she said on the third morning of their mission life, “the
wind has fallen very considerably on this side of the Island. We could
go out in it. Probably we shall have news from St. George’s tonight
about the whole Island. Tomorrow we may even be free to go back to
Everslade. But I don’t intend to wait for the MacTaggerts’ messenger. I
have my own. I am going to get news secretly this morning. I have found
a way of slipping out without being seen while the breakfasts are on. I
shall write a note to say that I have a slight headache and don’t wish
to be disturbed—you can give it to Mrs. MacTaggert for me and see that
no one comes to this door to look after me or bring me food. You can say
it’s a bilious headache brought on by the storm and all I need is to be
left alone. I shall lock the door.”

“You can write all that and pin your note outside the door,” Margorie
replied firmly. “I am going with you. There’s still a lot of wind and
it’s not safe to go out alone.” Their eyes met. There was a long, silent
battle of the will between them. Elvira would have preferred to go
alone, but she yielded. She did not know why she gave in to that silent
concentration of purpose in Margorie’s eyes. It did not often happen.
Elvira could always hurt Margorie more than Margorie could hurt her.
Perhaps this ability to be hurt was in itself a strength; to be hurt so
deeply and yet never to withdraw the blank check of the soul—which
Margorie had laid, once and for all, in Elvira’s hands—was in itself an
ultimate power. But on this occasion Elvira saw a certain advantage in
taking Margorie with her. The more she involved a brigadier’s daughter
in what she was doing the less involved she might herself be in what
came of it.

“Very well,” she said at last, “you _may_ come with me. I am going to
the Hill of Silence. You have never seen Old Sam. He lives there and he
is the Obeah King. Adassa will send or bring a message there for me to
let me know what has happened at Everslade. I arranged it with her
before she left. She couldn’t get to the Hill before this morning but
she’s sure to turn up while we are there.”

“How will she know about Everslade,” Margorie asked scornfully, “when
she ran away in a panic like the rest of them?”

“She was not in too great a panic to listen to me,” Elvira replied a
little grimly. “She will go first to Everslade and bring us news of what
she finds there.”

Margorie’s eyes had never left Elvira’s face; now they seemed to slide
beneath the surface of Elvira’s nerves to the meaning behind the glazed
brightness of her expressionless eyes. “How do I know?” Elvira answered
irritably. “We go there to find out. Anything may happen in a hurricane.
I always told you Everslade wasn’t safe. Henriette should have been
moved in the car with the rest, whether she couldn’t lie straight or
not. But that poor fool Lucy arranged it herself. She must take the
consequences. A shutter could blow open and let the wind in and blow off
Everslade’s roof. I warned her—I had nothing to do with her staying.”

“No,” Margorie repeated slowly. “You had nothing to do with it. Whatever
happens, we can say that.”

Elvira frowned. Stubborn people should always be stupid, she thought,
but unfortunately they weren’t always stupid. They not only stuck to
things, they sometimes saw what they were sticking to.

Elvira and Margorie slipped out separately without being seen. The wind
still blew with strength but with varying persistence, and along the
valley floor they were almost completely sheltered from its uncertain
force. In an hour they had reached the green tongue of hillside that ran
down into the valley from the round-topped summit.

“Shall we _see_ Old Sam?” Margorie asked her. “Does he know we are
coming?”

Elvira did not like discussing Old Sam, but she admitted a little
ungraciously, “It’s quite likely he’ll come to the hut. He’s very
uncanny that way. I don’t believe anyone knows exactly where he lives,
in some hole, probably, in the Bush. But if we go to the hut that’s
called his—where nobody lives—he may turn up. Not because he’s seen
you or knows when to expect you, but just because he _knows_.”

“What _does_ he know?” Margorie persisted.

“Well, somehow or other _who_ you are and _why_ you’re there,” Elvira
admitted. “He’ll know, for instance, about that night last June—when we
went by moonlight and cut down the silk-cotton tree. I told you then—it
makes us one with Obeah and he is the King of Obeah.”

“You said it made us one with each other, that it was a kind of
marriage,” Margorie murmured in a low, moved voice.

“That’s true,” Elvira agreed a little impatiently. “It _does_ bind you
to the person you are acting with—it is a kind of vow. We couldn’t have
cut the tree down alone, for one thing, though it was a very young
tree.”

“What a shriek it gave when it fell,” Margorie said, gazing up at the
round, treeless hill above her, “as if a heart had been killed with it.”
Elvira said nothing. Why was the hill so green, Margorie wondered, when
all the hills about it and the parched valley at its foot were
dust-colored with drought? Although no homes or people were visible,
they found a little path wandering up the hillside, and halfway up the
hillside the path sank into a little ripple of ground filled with
undergrowth. A hut concealed itself among the low trees. There was only
a bench inside it, and a little stool. Margorie had a queer feeling that
someone had just been there, and she found that she did not want to shut
the door after her. The hut was clean but had a musty smell, as if it
had not been used for the purposes of life for a long time. They sat on
the bench with relief after their long tussle with the wind, but it was
not a restful feeling sitting there. The silence had no peace in it,
only a strange sinister quality as if it were listening. The door they
had closed behind them opened with a silent jerk. The most extraordinary
figure Margorie had ever seen followed the wind into the hut. He was
unusually tall and thin. The skin looked stretched out over his bones,
as if there were nothing between the gray-black parchment and the wiry
frame it hung on. You could not believe that behind that dry, tight skin
any blood flowed. He was dressed in rags and tatters from different
garments long fallen to pieces and showing bare patches of his skeleton
frame. His eyes, deep sunk in his skull, burned steadily between red
rims. He stared at them as if they were in the way of something else
that he was looking at. He gave them no greeting, but, turning his head
away from them, sat on the stool muttering to himself, his back half
turned toward them. Elvira opened her lips to speak and shut them again.
Margorie saw that Elvira was shuddering with long, convulsive
shudders—as if she were a rabbit being drawn toward a boa constrictor.
Elvira’s body did not move, but her will and the strength of her mind
went out of her toward the old man sitting with his back to her on the
stool.

Margorie felt that she was looking at a ravaged, horrible old
skeleton—and nothing more. The old man was dirty, perhaps he had never
washed, old diseases lived and hung about him without the power to kill,
or to be healed by life. Time passed but Margorie was no more conscious
of its passing than if she had been under an anesthetic. A streak of
sickly sunshine came through the unglassed window of the hut and crawled
slowly across the floor till it reached the old man’s foot. Margorie
could not take her eyes from the shining distortion of the gnarled black
toes projecting from half a hideous broken boot.

Suddenly the old man moved and, rising, unlatched the door. Adassa stood
there in the entrance of the hut. Before she greeted her mistress she
exchanged a long rambling greeting with the old man. Margorie could not
understand a word they said to each other, although she was familiar
with the West Indian dialect. Yet she got the impression that Elvira
understood every word of it. Elvira ceased her convulsive tremblings
when she saw Adassa; the color was drawn out of her face, but for the
moment power flowed back into her and she sat erect and in control of
herself.

Adassa greeted her mistress and Margorie in her usual singsong drawl. “I
carried out your orders, Missie,” she told Elvira. “I went to Everslade
last night though the wind was terrible—dead I thought I was and
scattered over the mountainside a dozen times before I reached the
school—and what was there at the end of it all? The house stood, and in
the back rooms the mistress and the sick child were, quiet and safe, and
with them the two Asiatics, father and daughter O’San. I could do them
no great service. They look after themselves, it seems, so I took the
coffee the mistress gave me while I rested, and then I went back to my
own people. Every minute might have been my last or theirs. Other huts
went. The annex roof is off and all things in it carried away or broken.
They all say the Devil breaks up the Island because of the sins in it.
But do those who sin most get broken?”

“You did well,” Elvira said, after a prolonged pause. “Since everything
is now easier and the wind has fallen we may return tonight or tomorrow.
It would be well if all the servants went back to Everslade today—can
you get this order to them?”

“It shall be as you say, Missie, they will go back. The clouds are off
the peak. There is nothing else I am to do?”

“There is nothing at all,” Elvira said firmly. “Go now.” Adassa bowed
low to Elvira and with a curious half-sullen, half-reverent inclination
in the direction of the old man, who had gone back to his stool, she
closed the door after her. The old man turned slowly round to face the
bench on which the two women sat. His strange, blank gaze swept across
them like a searchlight that finds nothing in an empty sky. When he
spoke it was quite clearly, in the native dialect they both understood.

“You have asked for Death,” he said slowly. “But remember if you do not
use Him—He will use you. You will get Death since you have asked for
Him.” Then he got up and opened the door. Margorie thought the trees
took him, for he did not seem to move before they had swallowed him.
Elvira started shaking again, cowering down on the bench and covering
her face with her hands.

“What did he mean, Elvira?” Margorie demanded.

“Don’t speak of it here,” Elvira implored. “Everything you say up here
is dangerous. Don’t speak at all.” They got up and went down the hill
into the queer, glaring light. The sunshine glistened on the valley
floor as if there were something sticky in its glazed substance. The
wind behind them seemed to be trying to blow them off the Hill of
Silence knowing that they were not safe.

“He did not mean anything,” Elvira said at last when they had reached
the valley. “He is just a queer ignorant old man. Let us forget what he
said. It is all superstitious nonsense. I only went there to meet Adassa
because I wanted to hear if Lucy was all right. I’m not sorry we can
have this talk together in peace though. We mustn’t feel violent or
exaggerated about Lucy. I am sure there is some civilized method of
getting her to go. I don’t say accidents don’t happen—they do, and it
would be silly to suppose they’re always unfavorable—but we mustn’t
_make_ them happen when we can use our wits instead. Now you told me
something the other day which interested me very much. I didn’t say
anything at the time because I wanted to think it over. Besides, you
can’t say important things in hurricanes, they don’t sound important.
You said you heard Lucy talking to Philip Calgary over the telephone
before the wind struck. Do you remember? I want to know now how you came
to hear it and exactly what it was you heard.”

“Yes, I remember,” Margorie said slowly, “but it wasn’t much. I’d felt
odd all night—I couldn’t sleep—the wind got up and slapped things, and
then dropped in such a funny way, so I got up early and went to take a
bath in Mrs. Armstrong’s wing, which has the nicest bathroom. The door
of her room was open. She was standing by the telephone and I heard her
say, ‘Yes, Philip,’ as if she liked saying his name. I thought it rather
odd. She held the telephone a long time in her hand after she’d finished
listening, and she still looked as if she were pleased about something.
I didn’t hear anything else.”

“It was quite enough,” Elvira told her in a satisfied voice. “There is
no other Philip she could have been speaking to, and no doubt he’d just
given her the first hurricane warning. They always send them out first
to hospitals.”

“But why should she be pleased about a hurricane?” Margorie objected in
her matter-of-fact voice.

“There’s no fool like a fool in love,” Elvira said bitterly. “She was
pleased to hear the sound of his voice—hurricanes meant nothing to her
while she heard it.”

“I can understand that,” Margorie observed quietly. “It makes me a
little sorry for her if she loves him like that—even though he is
black.”

“Well, it won’t make the school committee feel sorry for her,” said
Elvira viciously. “It will have quite another effect. This will help us
to get rid of her—without violence.”

Margorie stood still. “But I don’t like that,” she said with conviction.
“I’d rather have violence, I’d rather do it myself.”

“Don’t talk such nonsense,” Elvira cried angrily. “Neither you nor I
must be even indirectly guilty of violence. Would you throw away the
very thing you want to get by removing Lucy? No, you must remain, for my
sake, in the right. You must use your father to help me to get rid of
her. The rest of the committee are all prejudiced in her favor, they
might try to cover up her tracks. They aren’t honest, but your father
_is_—he’ll expose her _and_ get rid of her too. I want to do both now.”

A spasm of pain crossed the girl’s face. “But that’s just it,” she tried
to explain. “Father is honest. I can’t use him. Besides, there’s this
woman he’s going to marry—instead of my mother. They talk over
everything together now, even me, and how I’ll take it. I’m polite, of
course, to both of them, but I’ve stopped speaking to him really about
anything. He knows what I feel. I can’t begin with this.”

“This hasn’t anything to do with your feelings,” Elvira insisted. “You
must speak to him for the honor of the school. You respect _that_, don’t
you? You can easily convince him of what after all is the truth, that
this love affair with Philip Calgary is why Whiteleaf went off in a
huff. Once start this new scandal and it will run like fire through a
dry wood. Lucy’ll _have_ to go. I was patient before because I thought
in time she’d marry Bob Anstruther, but Philip Calgary—well—that’s an
insult I can’t swallow.”

“You say that as if you specially minded,” Margorie observed. “Do you,
Elvira? What is Philip Calgary to you?”

A faint derisive smile touched Elvira’s lips. She put her hand on
Margorie’s arm. “Oh, no,” she said ironically. “Nothing concerns me less
than what happens to Philip Calgary. If I heard that he and all his
nigger hospital had been blown into Great Bay and drowned
overnight—why, I would laugh, Margorie, I would laugh! A good riddance,
I should say, to that traitor Charles Ransom’s friend and all his black
rubbish. Don’t you love your country, Margorie, don’t you believe in it
as I do? I am seven-eighths white, and every drop in me calls out that I
am one with the British Empire. When he took Whiteleaf I laughed. And
when she ran away and left him I laughed—but I didn’t know _why_ she
had left him. Now I _know_, that is what makes the difference. If he
marries Lucy, and there won’t be any question with her of anything else,
he tears down our flag and spits on it. Don’t you agree with me?”

Margorie hesitated. “In a sense I do,” she answered consideringly. “It
would shock me—it would shock father, of course—it certainly ought to
be stopped—but somehow or other, Elvira, I wish there was some other
_way_ of stopping it! Besides, after all she only said, ‘Yes, Philip,’
over the telephone, when she had been told about the hurricane and was
in a hurry.”

“But you said,” Elvira maliciously reminded her, “that she stood for
quite a long time with the receiver in her hand, looking pleased. That
wasn’t panic about the hurricane.”

Margorie’s arm was locked in hers. The wind blew them on their way
together as if they were one being. “You will act for me,” Elvira asked
in her deep rich voice, “you won’t fail me or your country, you’ll do
what I tell you?”

“I will do _all_ that you tell me—always!” Margorie answered. Elvira
could feel the quick vibration of the girl’s heart beating against her
own. “But, Elvira,” Margorie added in a troubled voice, “why did that
old man say, ‘If you don’t use Death—Death will use you’? What did he
mean by that?”

“He is mad,” Elvira said sharply. “We must make our own plans now. He
has failed us, we must pay no more attention to what he says. I always
thought it was nonsense, but Adassa said it would be no harm to try.
Forget it and never tell anyone, Margorie, that you have been to the
Hill of Silence.”




                             _CHAPTER XXXI_


Within five minutes of the hurricane warning Philip had retailed it to
Lucy, his mother, and O’San; then he concentrated upon his own problems.
He had three hundred and fifty patients, about a hundred of whom were as
ill as human beings can be, and many of them already doomed to die.
Another two hundred were complete liabilities; but perhaps fifty, within
limitations, could be made useful at a pinch. His staff was composed of
his medical colleague, the matron, six nurses, and six orderlies, yet
once the wind struck, he could count with absolute certainty only upon
one nurse.

This nurse had long been the bane of Philip’s life. She passionately
adored him, and leaped up under his feet when he wanted and far more
often when he didn’t want her. She was the only fully trained theater
nurse the hospital possessed, and as necessary to Philip as an extra
hand. He hated the sight of her. Women, when they are adored by male
admirers whose passion they fail to return, are respected by the general
public for their charms. But men, ardently desired by unwanted women,
are much less popular: other men laugh at them, and women indignantly
consider them either unkind or faithless. Flight and discourtesy are
men’s only means of escape. Yet Philip suddenly realized that this
emergency would be considerably lightened by Aimée Baker’s complaint.
She would stick to him, hurricane or no hurricane, and since her spirit
was the life of the hospital, she would shirk nothing of its demands.

The moment Philip began to take what precautions were available
(unfortunately familiar to his native patients), all those who could
walk, and many whom no one considered capable of walking, melted away.
It was no use locking doors, for they vanished through windows, covered
verandas, and even out of skylights and over roofs, until nobody capable
of rendering the hospital practical aid remained in it. The matron and
five nurses were among the missing. No orderlies could be found, except
one robust, half-witted giant, known as Mutton, and the old lady who had
cooked for Philip during the typhoid epidemic and whom no one had been
able to get rid of since.

Philip’s medical colleague, apologetically and belatedly, rushed to his
home close by to help a shiftless wife and four young children,
promising to return, but by the time he had fastened up his house one
step outside it would have whirled him into the bay. Before the full
force of the wind struck, while Philip was closing the last and safest
aperture, a knock came outside the door and he found two nuns in a wild
whirl of black garments on the doorstep. He dragged them in, flung
himself against the door, and fought it shut, as if he were dealing with
a maniac. “A moment later and you would have been swept into the sea!”
he gasped.

“Wherever we were, we should have been in the hands of God,” the taller
of the two sisters said rebukingly, her habit falling into its familiar
folds as if by magic. “I am Sister Teresa,” she added, “Sister in charge
of St. Katherine’s, and this is Sister Bridget. We can both nurse. As
you know, the medical authorities on these islands have prevented our
doing so on account of our habits. I do not, however, suppose that at
this juncture you will refuse us permission to wear them.”

Philip smiled grimly. “Sisters,” he said, “if you were head hunters and
wore scalps, I should welcome your presence, provided you could nurse. I
have two hundred very seriously ill patients and one theater nurse. I
have collected my patients into the two most sheltered rooms, these are,
the mortuary chapel and the casualty receiving station. They will,
however, require more adjustment than I have yet had time to give them.
There are the beds and the patients in them, men on the right and women
on the left. There are also a few rather imminent maternity cases in my
own quarters, close to the theater.”

“Sister Bridget will attend to the women and I to the men,” Sister
Teresa told him briefly. “Your theater nurse can perhaps be responsible
for the maternity cases. Please do not have any further anxiety.” Philip
took one glance at Sister Teresa’s steady gray eyes and realized that he
had no further need for anxiety.

For three days and three nights, without sleep or rest, he and the
Sisters ran the hospital together, gallantly seconded by Aimée and by a
transformed and almost jubilant Mutton, who for the first time in his
life found that he was considered useful. The kitchen was flooded out,
and the old lady still cooking in it all but drowned. The wind punched a
hole in the roof, but working in a dark pandemonium, while Sister Teresa
standing on a ladder held a lamp close beneath them to guide them,
Philip and Mutton closed it. Water seeped in through unknown sources
from above and from below. Children were born and patients died. There
was never an hour without a fresh call upon their wits and muscles.

“Men are sometimes quite useful,” Sister Teresa remarked to Sister
Bridget, pausing for an instant’s consultation between the wards and
what was left of the kitchen. “Fancy his having thought to put the food
and medical stores out of reach—even before we came. Can anything be
done to salvage the stove, do you think, now that you have resuscitated
Mrs. Marsh? I should think she could go on cooking.”

“We couldn’t stop her,” Sister Bridget agreed, “and when he has finished
operating I expect Dr. Calgary can get out the stove. It’s under three
feet of water at the moment but the water is not rising. Can you prevent
the ward from flooding?”

“I can keep enough water out for the present,” Sister Teresa observed
blandly. “There does not, however, seem a water shortage at the moment,”
she added, her eyes twinkling, for they lived in a land of drought.

“Sister,” asked Sister Bridget, not fearfully, but as one who has the
right to know what odds are against her, “will the sea come in—or was
that just a chance wave that flooded the kitchen?”

Sister Teresa smiled reassuringly. “He thinks it was just a wave,” she
answered, “and he says the wind is gradually trampling down the sea so
there is no great danger till it drops, if then.” Their eyes rested with
relief upon each other, as if a distant danger was a form of present
security. “If we can go on as we are,” Sister Teresa said, turning back
into her ward of stricken men, “we shall do very well.”

An eggshell on the brink of disaster, the hospital swayed and flinched
against the storm. The sea and the sky thrashed at each other with
resistless energy. Between the thunder of the sky and the thunder of the
sea, a baby drew its first astonished breath and gave, through agony, a
hint of joy.

Philip’s mind, anchored in emergency, registered fleeting glimpses of
Lucy’s face, but it no longer tormented him with its forbidden beauty.
He was safe beyond the region of choice. What he loved was no longer his
responsibility or within his power. It was as if he were alive in
another world from his heart. Sealed up in his hospital, alone with his
backward and vulnerable people, Philip knew without the shadow of a
doubt the purpose of his life. As he stood at the top of his wards and
found the eyes of his patients drawn to him in passionate confidence,
even their pain submissive to his presence, he understood why his heart
had renounced Whiteleaf and why—since he was in a world beyond desire
or hope—he was free to love Lucy. He found suddenly that loving Lucy
and being alive were the same thing.

He was unaware of it, but Aimée Baker felt a kindred freedom. She who
had always loved in vain felt her frustration vanish. In this turmoil of
destruction she could serve what she loved without shame or vexation of
spirit.

Although Philip’s eyes glancing at her for co-operation valued her no
more than the instrument she handed him, yet she knew that she was of
value to him. He could not perform the chronic miracles of his hand and
brain without her. Rocking on his feet with fatigue, holding the whole
hospital together by his courage, Philip would have been beaten without
Aimée’s unflagging support. Hers was his victory. Even if death
rollicked through the broken walls of their frail shelter and tossed
them all into the sea, Aimée knew that she would have died for the same
thing as Philip.

“You’d better see if that squalling girl in the maternity room is ready
for the theater or not,” Philip said without looking up from the
operating table. “I’ll put this fellow back to bed while you get her
ready.” No marriage service had words of a deeper unity than this meager
acknowledgment of their partnership.

The smile Aimée gave him as she went roused even Philip’s notice. He
thought to himself that his fellow workers seemed to be enjoying the
knife edge of catastrophe as much as he himself enjoyed it. It was his
patients for whom he felt compassion. They had to be passive and could
not use themselves against danger. When he could leave the theater,
Philip spent all his time in the wards, so as to join his courage to his
patients’ helplessness. He liked to watch Sister Teresa and Sister
Bridget going about their unceasing business with assured and
unflinching serenity. They carried with them from patient to patient the
reminder of powers beyond the scope of storms. Patients who were too ill
to care what happened to them outside the mortal struggle taking place
in their own bodies became calm in their company.

“They see God in the sky behind the hurricane,” Philip thought, “and I
feel God in my hands working for my people. Who can say which is the
truer conception? There is a point where religion and science meet. We
have to work with what we ourselves have—every bit of what we
have—before either God or Law will function for us.”

Sister Teresa came up to him with a cup of coffee in her hands and her
long black veil sweeping unhygienically behind her. “Drink this,” she
said sternly. “It’s eight hours since you’ve taken anything. And when
you have drunk it, Mutton is prepared to help you dig out the kitchen
stove.”




                            _CHAPTER XXXII_


Lucy crept out onto the terrace. The dawn had wakened her, after her
first uneasy sleep, with the shock of silence.

Myra and Henriette slept on, peace spreading deeper and deeper into
their soothed and quieted bodies, but Lucy could feel no relief until
she knew that Philip was alive. The beauty of the reawakened world was
hollow to her. Far beneath the terrace the plain spread, a shining
tapestry of emerald and peacock blue threaded with golden light.

Misty veils of rose and azure drank up the rising sun and covered the
diaphanous regions of the sea. Birds’ notes pierced the silence with
rapture. Their wings, no longer pitted against the ferocious forces of
the storm, flickered swifter than light through the unruffled air. A
feather’s movement was enough to balance them. Had they out-flown the
rough fringes of the hurricane and reached some distant space of
unviolated sky where they had found security? What messenger had told
them their return was safe? What confidence had brought them back to
their lost homes?

Lucy’s ears were awake with a new keenness to the slightest sound. In
her heart—and through all her roused senses—time came to a stop. She
felt as if she were visiting a new world. There were no connections any
more, no letters, no telephones, no other voices. Soon the needs of the
day would come back to her, and all its duties, but now alone upon the
terrace there was no “next thing”—instead, a strange sense of harmony
began to invade her. She felt an inner certainty that Philip and his
Island had survived together. Lonely and defenseless against the
elements, cut off on all sides by the tideless sea, there was in both
the same resilient life. The sun warmed Lucy as she stood in its first
tentative rays. She watched a lizard dart across the wall she leaned on.
She felt herself draw closer to Philip and his Island, till she became a
part of the mystic light and the returning day. The great gates of
Everslade lay flat. The garden was a shambles of uprooted trees, while
strange survivals from the scattered contents of the annex blinked
forlornly back at her in the sunlight. Armchairs were strewn with sodden
leaves; a bedstead leaned drunkenly against a torn hibiscus bush. The
world of precious and familiar things suddenly seemed to Lucy senseless
and unnecessary. She turned away from it and stared back at the big,
battered mansion behind her as if it were a stranger.

Two hours later she heard the children’s voices ringing through the
woods. In a rush they reached the terrace and swept toward her, full of
eagerness and laughter. They clung around her, pouring out questions and
interjecting their demands for what had happened to her with their own
adventures, but slowly Lucy became aware that behind their affection and
eagerness there was something hidden. They knew something—something
they hadn’t liked—and they wanted Lucy _not_ to know it, for fear that
if she did it might become more real to them. Their confidence in her
was the same, but Lucy had a feeling that their confidence in life had
been shaken.

Elvira, cleaving a rapid way through them, cried, “My dear! My dear!
Thank God you’re safe!” and would have clasped Lucy in her arms, but
Lucy, drawing the children closer to her to act as a screen, evaded
Elvira’s embrace. Her eyes meeting Elvira’s could not hide their
coldness; but Elvira hid any reaction to it. She slipped her arm into
Lucy’s and appeared to the whole school as one with their Head, in
shining amity and relief.

Yet it was to Miss Lestrange, not to Elvira, that Lucy said quickly:
“You’re all right, _all_ of you, you’re safe?”

Miss Lestrange, slightly touching Lucy’s extended hand with her cool
fingertips, replied with her usual indifference to emotion, but at
greater length than was her custom. “The school is intact. Dr.
MacTaggert’s mission, though comparatively sheltered, was grossly
overcrowded. They did the best they could for us, but there was no
reading lamp by my bedside, and Dr. MacTaggert constantly called upon me
to play appalling hymn tunes on a piano that had not been tuned for
years, and must have been a mediocre instrument when new. This garden is
in a terrible state!” Miss Lestrange looked disparagingly at the
uprooted trees, as if they were an oversight on Lucy’s part; yet she
somehow managed to convey to Lucy at the same time that she was not
unpleased by her survival.

Lucy told the assembled children that there was to be no school for the
day. Everybody was to be put to some use setting the house and garden in
order. Columbus discovering fresh islands that might turn out to be
continents could not have felt better employed. The children dispersed
in excited groups, streamed through the house, or headed for the lost
treasures of the annex afloat in the garden. They were half shocked and
half enchanted by the ravages of the storm.

“_They’re_ all right,” Lucy said to herself, “but they’ve got something
on their minds all the same—and it isn’t only the storm.”

It was some time before she could snatch a moment alone with Nancy in
her office. “_Did_ anything happen,” she asked her anxiously, “I mean
anything unusual, before you were safe?”

Nancy checked herself halfway down a list she was writing and answered
without looking up at Lucy, “It is difficult to say what _is_ unusual in
a hurricane. We got over the Gap in time—but only just. The woods were
stifling and the children got rather jammed up in them. Queer gusts of
wind kept blowing the branches back into our faces. I was quite far
behind with the little ones, probably Miss Lestrange saw better than I
did what happened—only she didn’t _stay_ ahead. She came back to help
me—with Margorie Fielding. All the other older girls, with Elvira and
Rebecca, got too far ahead, no one could keep up with them.
Finally—well, I think they took to their heels and ran away.”

“They _left_ you—with all the little ones in the wood?” Lucy asked
incredulously.

Nancy raised her head and looked at Lucy; her nostrils were distended,
her eyes shone into Lucy’s with a hard, watchful look. “They ran,” she
repeated. “Miss Loring says she risked her life to get help for us,
because she saw we couldn’t make it. We did just make it. We carried the
smallest on our backs, the three of us, and then ran back, when the
first ones were over, to collect more. The big girls—and those two
others—would have made all the difference. The children understood what
had happened, but of course they’ll never tell, and I suppose I’d better
not have told either.”

“Don’t say that!” Lucy exclaimed sharply. “I must always know the truth:
I trust you to tell me, and I know you _have_ told it to me. I meant to
tell you anyhow that I’ve begun to understand about Elvira Loring.”

The watchfulness melted out of Nancy’s eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I
know you liked her. Well, so did I—once. Besides, I admit Elvira has
had it hard. If it had been me it wouldn’t have mattered; I’m so black I
know it and I don’t let it get me down. But to be so white you don’t
feel you _are_ one of us, and yet to _be_ one, and then to climb almost
to the top of your profession and never reach it—well, it’s tough,
tougher than _you_ can ever understand. If she weren’t so dangerous I
wouldn’t have told you—and none of the others ever would.”

“Perhaps I understand better than you think,” Lucy said slowly. “But I’m
not quite sure I know what to do about what I understand.”

“Look here,” Nancy said eagerly, “take my advice—don’t do anything, not
about this, because we can’t prove it. Watch out for something we _can_
prove—and take care of yourself meanwhile. You may be sure Myra and I
will go on doing what we can. And another thing—don’t let her know you
_are_ any different to her, or that you have heard what happened in the
woods.”

“I’m afraid she knows already,” Lucy admitted. “She tried to kiss me and
I didn’t let her.”

“Oh, that wasn’t wise,” Nancy said thoughtfully. “On this Island we keep
things to ourselves when we don’t like them. It’s safer.”




                            _CHAPTER XXXIII_


The day after the hurricane was a mere welter of nerves reacting on
small emergencies. Lucy, hurrying from one startling crisis to another,
was infinitely relieved at the sight of Bob driving up with a lorry full
of food and prepared to deal with choked pipes, dangerous walls, or any
other threatening residue of the storm. He had a sure touch with the
scatter-witted servants, and left Lucy free to deal with her own more
immediate problems. All day long teachers and adolescent girls burst
into tears without any perceptible reason. Miss Lestrange pushed a
child, who thumped on the piano like a pawing horse, off the music
stool, and shook her; she then added to the child’s terrified amazement
by giving her a flurried kiss and a stick of barley sugar.

“I think I should resign,” Miss Lestrange said, meeting Lucy in the
passage after this incident. “I seem incapable of carrying out my
duties—thunder could not have thumped louder than this child did on the
piano, and she threw her whole weight forward on the loud pedal as if
she were riding a bicycle. Still, there are no real excuses for such a
lapse as mine.”

“If she rode a bicycle,” Lucy murmured absent-mindedly, her thoughts on
their first big meal, “she should lean back and pedal lightly.”

Miss Lestrange, who had never ridden a bicycle in her life, refused this
doubtful support with a wave of her hand. “It is the principle of the
thing I allude to,” she said with dignity. “I lost my head completely.”

“Never mind,” Lucy told her warmly, “when it was necessary to keep it
you kept it, on the way to the Gap, as I’ve already heard. I daresay Ada
enjoyed that music lesson more than any she’d ever had—winding up with
barley sugar like that. And if she thumped rather worse than usual it
was probably because I’d told the school they needn’t _have_ any lessons
today.”

“There—you see,” Miss Lestrange agreed with gloomy triumph, “if I
forgot your express order it must show that I was acting in a
psychologically incorrect way. I probably felt my power instinct menaced
by the hurricane and wished to exert it—over that poor defenseless
child. A teacher who acts in any such way should choose another
profession.”

Lucy wondered how Miss Lestrange _could_ choose another profession when
she was over sixty and dependent on her earnings, but she said very
sympathetically, “Don’t you think we all behave exceptionally in
exceptional circumstances? I’m so very sorry but I’ve got to speak to
Cook. There’s some pork Mr. Anstruther has brought over which must be
cooked at once.”

“Pork,” Miss Lestrange said to herself bitterly, “when I spoke to her of
principles! She’s far too young and feather-headed to be a
headmistress.”

Elvira flashed past them each in turn surrounded by a happy group of
children on their way to the bathing pool. She helped the children to
clear the pool of leaves and débris and then instituted a dancing and
crooning game which kept them amused for hours. She felt herself
reinstated in the fascinated eyes of the attentive children. Lucy too,
Elvira thought, could not fail to be impressed by her unruffled nerves.
She did not dream that the skin had formed too quickly over the hole she
had made in the general confidence of the school, and would never heal.

“Wonderful,” Lucy said to Bob, when she had spoken to the appeased Cook
about the pork, and had seen the chimney begin to draw under Bob’s
expert ministrations.

“Lucy,” Bob said, descending from the ladder, “Judy has a splendid
idea—she’s getting up a subscription dinner dance at the Grand Hotel,
she and three friends of hers, considered the best hostesses on the
Island for social stunts. They are paying for everything, and then
charging five hundred chosen guests two guineas each for admission.
That’s one thousand pounds clear for hurricane victims. Everybody that
gets tickets will _have_ to subscribe two guineas, whether they go or
not. Their names will be published in the _Reaper_, so they won’t like
to be felt left out—besides, they’ll like to give, a thing like this
makes people generous. I promised Judy you’d come.”

Lucy stopped counting out stores for Annabella to cook. “A dance,” she
said, “on top of a hurricane? Won’t that be rather funny—if people have
been killed?” Annabella’s face became masklike. She was listening
avariciously to each scrap of the conversation. “Wicked,” she thought,
“not funny!” and her heart turned equally against both these rich and
jaunty people to whom even hurricanes were opportunities for mirth and
pleasure.

“Not in two weeks’ time,” Bob replied reassuringly to Lucy. “They won’t
ask the planters who’ve been too badly hit. No news had come in before I
started out at dawn when the wind dropped, but our side of the Island
anyhow wasn’t too browned off. We lost some cattle and the sugar crop
got superficially damaged. Nothing much. Of course the huts by the sea
got flooded out. But there wasn’t any loss of life to speak of. Probably
Black Water and the north of the Island copped it worst. A subscription
dance is much the best way of collecting money—why, it’s all sheer
profit, with these four hostesses paying out of their own pockets for
eats and drinks.”

Lucy forced herself to say, “What—what heaps of sugar you’ve brought,
Bob, and what a magnificent ham. It will last us over a week. Yes, of
course I’ll come,” she added, meeting Bob’s imploring eyes and holding
onto the table with both hands. She thought she could manage quite
nicely not to faint and found that she succeeded, though the picture of
the dance and people being blown out to sea kept slipping in and out of
her mind, like the jagged edges of a jigsaw puzzle which refuse to fit.

No news from the rest of the Island came in till sunset, when the
Brigadier sent up a sergeant from the Gap, to say he’d keep the sick
children a week longer, and did Lucy need anything. Filtered through the
dramatic mind of the sergeant, although St. George’s and King’s House
were unharmed, hundreds and thousands of pounds’ worth of damage had
taken place on the north and east sides of the Island. Six big planters
had watched large fortunes whisked away from their eyes in a few
seconds. Bananas had come off badly, sugar was damaged but might
survive. No white people had been killed though thirty were injured.
Over a hundred natives were dead and two hundred more missing or
severely injured. Thousands of people were homeless and St. Bridget’s, a
small port on the Black Water estuary, had been blotted out by a wave.

“There’s always far less damage than people make out at first,” Bob told
Lucy reassuringly. “You pop off to bed and get some sleep. You look as
if you’d been running blind for a week. I’ll get over as soon as I’ve
helped my work people to get straightened out.”

“Was the hospital destroyed too?” Lucy asked the soldier, as if she had
not heard Bob speak.

“Well, I wouldn’t rightly know, lady,” the sergeant said with respectful
glee. He had a natural flair for talking to ladies, though this was for
the moment in conflict with a desire to enlarge upon honors. “St.
Bridget’s is near the hospital, but nothing was said about it,” he
admitted, “and it could be the wave just took that cove and not the big
bay next it. If it had come over the big bay like, we’d be almost
certain to have heard of it.” The sergeant accepted the tip he had
deserved and vanished.

Bob stood by his empty lorry wondering what kind of parting Lucy was
going to give him. She stood a few feet from him, curiously remote and
aloof. Behind her rose the dark walls of the ruined annex. “It’s been
too wonderful what you’ve done,” she said at last. “I can’t thank you
enough. I just don’t know how I’d have got on without you.”

“That’s what I want you to feel always,” Bob told her, moving a step
nearer to her. A shadow by the annex wall moved at the same time.

“No—good-by,” Lucy said with warning firmness. She felt it was of
enormous importance that the shadow should not move again. Bob looked at
her uncertainly. He did not want to take advantage of her gratitude, yet
he longed with a desperate hunger for even a reluctant kiss. Lucy moved
back a step but she did not look at the annex. She kept her eyes on Bob.
“Good-by,” she said again, urgently, “and tell Judy I’ll come. Thank her
for everything.” This was dismissal, and Bob accepted it. He swung
himself into his empty lorry and drove away.

The shadow had gone when Lucy slipped into the ruined annex. Philip
stood there, his back against the wall, his hands clenched at his sides.

“Bob came to help me,” Lucy said desperately. “You can’t prevent
people’s kindness.”

“You can prevent your own,” Philip said without moving. Lucy looked
helplessly about her. There was half a bedstead and an untouched blue
Chinese vase. The broken white tiles under her feet were covered with
dust and rubble. Lucy sat down on the bedstead, because she found that
with nothing to hold on to she couldn’t stand up.

“All I care about,” she said after an endless pause, “is that you’re
alive. I didn’t know it—till just now.”

Philip did not move, but something in his voice changed. Gentleness
crept into it, in spite of the burning anger in his eyes.

“I would have come before if I could,” he told her. “I’m sorry that man
was here. You know I nearly murdered him once, and I might very easily
quite do so next time.”

“But there won’t be a next time—not the way you mean,” Lucy said
urgently. “Philip, come to me.” He moved then, with one swift movement
of his whole body, and stood looking down at her without anger. She
could see now what the hurricane had done to him. She looked deep into
his sleepless eyes and saw his temples beating above the hollows of his
cheeks. He had taken time to dress immaculately before he came to her.
His white silk shirt, open at the throat, left the column of his throat
bare. The line from his athlete’s head to his massive chest and
shoulders was delicate and firm. He bent his head toward her and she
thought of his free, resilient body as of a wave rising above her, a
wave into which she longed to sink and lose herself forever.

“Philip,” she said softly, “sit down beside me.” He sat down like an
obedient child. “I believed you were alive all the time,” she said in a
low voice, “or I couldn’t have gone on all day. Only I wasn’t sure, and
when the sergeant told us about Black Water—I was afraid!” As gently as
a devout Catholic might touch a relic, Philip lifted a strand of hair
that had fallen across Lucy’s face. She would not have known that he had
touched her if her heart had not known. “Did you come only to find out
if I were alive—or because you weren’t fighting me any more?” she asked
him in a whisper.

“I knew by midday that you were alive,” Philip admitted. “O’San sent me
word. My mother was with friends, we’d arranged that earlier. So I took
a short leave from the hospital to get some sleep. I suppose I came up
here to—to help you—because I wanted to come.”

“But you wouldn’t have come if you hadn’t cared?” Lucy whispered.

“Oh, I cared all right. Did you suppose I didn’t?” Philip asked
ironically. “That young Anstruther cared too, I noticed. And how many
more competitors have I in the race? I always like to know the exact
number before I decide to start. Didn’t you know I was one of the
Island’s runners, before the war?”

“Don’t laugh at me,” Lucy said in a shaking voice. “This is
different—what’s between us two—and you know it. There is no one
else.” Even the dead, Lucy thought to herself, have left me alone with
Philip.

They sat shoulder to shoulder with a space between and neither of them
moved to close it. Yet they could not hear the birds’ last songs nor see
the procession of the mountains retreating from indigo to black before
their eyes: they could see and feel nothing but each other.

“Lucy,” Philip said at last, “in a sense, of course, I’m aware that
there is this—feeling. But passion between a man and woman, however
strong, is a very uncertain factor. I have learned to control it. I want
both of us to be able to reckon what the results of our coming together
might be. I still feel most uncertain. I—I—Oh, hell, Lucy, I need a
night’s sleep before I know whether I’m drunk or sober!”

In a flash Lucy’s arms were around him, and she had drawn his head
against her breast; her very being melted into his. “Oh, I’m so glad—so
glad—not to be lonely any more,” she whispered. She felt his arms
tighten about her and his heart beating against her heart. She had
always felt sure of Philip, she knew instinctively that all his strength
was used for gentleness. But now Lucy felt sure of him in a new way. The
unknown territory of his being spread itself before her wide and deep,
governed by a curious innocence. She did not need to ask him about
Whiteleaf. She knew without being told, in the sudden release of his
controlled passion when he touched her, that Philip could never have
given himself to any woman as completely as he gave himself to her. He
had forgotten himself, and all his pride was gathered up in her.

“I can’t carry you home,” he said at last, “but I’ll carry you as far as
I can. Look, it’s dark now, and there’s the evening star.”

“You are my home,” Lucy murmured. “I’m glad there’s no roof and no
walls, really—nothing now between us and each other, Philip.”

He gave a quick, sharp sigh as he lifted her in his arms. “Unfortunately
you can’t occupy your home without a few preliminaries,” he told her.
“Don’t say anything about this yet, Lucy. We have to go through all the
proper forms and ceremonies for the sake of my self-respect as well as
yours. Whatever law and order require of us is going to be done. We
shall be condemned for the worst crime on the Island. We must learn to
preserve our own innocence no matter what other people think of us.”

Before they reached the first, thin beam of light from the house Philip
put Lucy gently from his arms. “I shall stay here till I see the light
from your balcony,” he whispered. “Try to sleep the clock round. I
shall. Now and when you wake, _think_, for God’s sake _think_, whether
what we’ve both got to face is worth it. Remember, if you love me at
all, it’s got to be from the center of your being and with every damned
thing you’ve got. Love me like that—as I love you—or let me go!”

Lucy found that her lips trembled too much to speak, but she took the
hand that still held hers and kissed it before she moved away from
Philip into the light.




                            _CHAPTER XXXIV_


Elvira leaned over her balcony, screened by heavy purple bells of
convolvulus, and watched a chance meeting take place between Lucy and
Margorie Fielding. Unfortunately they spoke, as she had feared they
would, too low and too little for her to follow what they said.

Elvira thought that there was no direct purpose in their meeting, though
as they were crossing the courtyard at the same time it would have been
more disconcerting for them to have avoided each other; still, in the
ease of their coming together Elvira read with bitterness that there was
no natural hostility between them.

Elvira noticed, as she often had before, how strong a likeness they bore
to each other. They both had slim, erect figures, and the same
well-shaped heads crowned with light brown hair that took the sunshine
in golden gleams. Each as she moved toward the other walked with the
same effortless, unspectacular dignity. Neither of them had ever been at
the mercy of a power beyond her own resources. They had never known
scorn or derision. They had never experienced destitution. Neither of
them had ever irretrievably blundered before the bar of human judgment.
How still they stood, half a yard apart, their neat, straight shoulders
and even their hands as steady as if they were being drilled!

Lucy spoke first, and she was the last to leave off speaking, but
Margorie listened as if she liked what she heard. Lucy moved away with a
friendly smile. Margorie did not return her smile, nor did she move
after Lucy had left her. She stood motionless in the hot noon air, as if
there was no purpose left in her.

Elvira hesitated; sooner or later she must let down the barrier of
silence that stood between her and this girl to whom she had lied, whom
she had deserted, leaving her to take over her own duties in a
hurricane, while she escaped to safety; whom she had for so long
enslaved and corrupted, but who was not as yet finally estranged from
her.

There always comes a moment in the lives of those who, feeling defrauded
themselves, have met their sense of deprivation by defrauding others,
when they have to expose their own dishonesty to their admirers. Elvira
had postponed this moment. She had even tried to hide from Margorie that
she had saved herself at the expense of others. But Elvira was uncertain
if she had succeeded. Margorie had made no comment on Elvira’s selfish
flight, nor had she expressed admiration for the heroism Elvira had
speciously produced to cover her panic.

Elvira did not know, and had hitherto shirked finding out, if Margorie
believed her lie or not. Had she managed to keep alive the false ideal
of herself which she had planted in the heart of her worshiper, and if
it were destroyed, or at best tarnished, how much had it shaken the
emotional control upon which Elvira counted?

Elvira had no wish to see her image shattered, but she had often had a
strong disinclination to pay for its upkeep. She felt like a stingy
bargain hunter at a sale, extremely loath to give up a good bargain, but
even more loath to pay for it.

Leaning a little farther over the balcony, she called softly,
“Margorie!” The girl turned instantly at the sound, as if her whole
being were redirected toward life. “Ah,” Elvira thought with relief.
“She still cares! I can still control her.”

Yet it was an awkward meeting for both of them. Margorie stood before
Elvira silently and with dread, perhaps awaiting a fresh enchantment, or
instead a fresh bewildering pang of disillusionment. How could she tell
what to say to this new Elvira, who had deserted her in danger, and lied
to cover her desertion, but who had the same exquisite soft, deep voice,
whose long slender hands were outstretched to greet her with the old
terrible tenderness?

“My dear, my dear,” Elvira reproachfully murmured. “What did you say to
Lucy Armstrong on the terrace just now? Why did you stop to speak to her
at all?”

Margorie’s gray, unflinching eyes looked with challenging straightness
into Elvira’s. “I wasn’t going to speak to her,” she answered, “unless
she spoke to me. When she stopped I had to. She thanked me for going
back to the little ones to help them over the Gap. I don’t think I said
anything at all, except perhaps ‘Oh!’ What could I say?”

“You could have said you arranged it with _me_,” Elvira told her
impatiently. “I had to run on to get MacTaggert and the students to help
the children. I happen to have always been a swift runner, but I have a
weak heart from racing when I was young. I risked my life to save them,
but that doesn’t matter, of course—so did you by going back—but she
hasn’t thanked _me_.”

Margorie’s eyes wavered before Elvira’s insistent liquid gaze. They
wandered around the room as if she were looking at it for the first
time. Everything Elvira possessed had had for Margorie a sacred look, as
if it were the furniture of a shrine. Now the chairs and tables, the
very bookshelves, and the deep crimson rug on the highly polished floor
had an emphatic, overcolored aspect, as if they were willfully
exaggerating a value which they had never truly possessed. She lifted
her disenchanted eyes at last to Elvira’s watchful face. “But there
wouldn’t have been time,” she said at last quietly. “We made no plan.
All the big girls ran away—so I ran back. I knew Nancy couldn’t manage
alone, and Miss Lestrange, though she stayed behind to help, is as
flimsy as a moth.”

“Why didn’t you say all this to me before, at the mission?” Elvira
demanded angrily, her wide nostrils dilating, her eyes blazing. “You
behaved _there_ as if you believed me. What has changed you? Why do you
no longer trust me?” Margorie whitened, but her eyes remained fixed
steadily upon Elvira’s face.

“It was different there,” she said slowly, after a pause. “Besides
I—hoped. I hoped you’d tell me the truth. I shouldn’t have minded your
just being frightened. I could have understood that. All the older girls
and Rebecca were, why shouldn’t _you_ have been? I was too, as far as
that goes—horribly frightened. I don’t even remember running back,
I—just went. Your going the other way—well—I wanted you to be safe.
Why should I care about that? I didn’t! I don’t! But don’t let’s talk
about it! I wanted to forget what you said at the mission to the
MacTaggerts, and then you said it all over again last night to Mrs.
Armstrong—and—I saw her eyes!” Margorie flung herself suddenly on the
floor and buried her head in the divan, shaking with sobs. “I knew she
didn’t believe you,” she cried inconsolably. Elvira moved toward her
with the intent gliding grace of an animal, and bending over Margorie,
drew the girl into her arms. Her lips closed on Margorie’s shaking lips.
There was a careless insolence in the forced caress, as if whether
Elvira were sure or not of what was in Margorie’s mind, she was certain
that she held her heart.

Margorie wrenched herself free from Elvira’s arms. “Don’t! Oh, don’t
touch me, not now, not like that!” she cried. “I’m so ashamed of you!”

“Of me?” Elvira cried, aghast. It seemed to her that she couldn’t have
heard aright. To be torn by the bleeding hands of her worshiper from her
own shrine was too incredible a fate. “You can’t mean what you say!
Listen, Margorie, it’s so absurd. One moment you’re ready to murder my
enemies, and the next you are upset like this because of a mere nothing.
You say there wasn’t a plan? Well, surely you and I know each other so
intimately, we act automatically together in a crisis. That amounts to a
plan. Every school friend I have on the Island will tell you I can run
like a deer and if you like I’ll get a certificate from my doctor to
prove to you my heart’s weak! Do stop thinking you have to behave like
Lucy Armstrong because you’re both British. I think I have every right
to be furious with you both for doubting me, and with you _most_ for
setting her and her suspicions up against me—I couldn’t have believed
it possible!”

The girl gave a long shuddering sigh, half of relief and half of
despair, because she could not struggle any longer against the voice she
loved. Her head sank against Elvira’s knee, but there had been a pause
first, rather a long pause, Elvira noticed, before Margorie’s head
rested against her.

“I didn’t want to write that letter,” Margorie said after a long
silence, “but I wrote it, Elvira—to my father. I sent it back by that
sergeant—about Mrs. Armstrong and Dr. Calgary. He was there again—last
night at the annex after she had said good-by to Bob Anstruther.”

Elvira’s relaxed figure stiffened. “Philip there again? Last night at
the annex?” she exclaimed. “What did you see? Was it in the dark? What
did they say to each other?”

“It wasn’t dark, not quite,” Margorie answered reluctantly. “I just
happened to be out there looking for a toy of Henriette’s she thought
might still be in the ruins. Mrs. Armstrong was sitting at the end of an
upturned bed, and Dr. Calgary stood with his back against the wall. He
looked rather—rather curious, I thought, like a person crucified. He
didn’t move at all, and when she asked him to sit down I thought perhaps
he hadn’t liked seeing Bob Anstruther saying good-by to her. He must
have seen them.”

“Did they kiss?” Elvira’s voice, suddenly grown harsh and grating, asked
above the still bowed head.

“Oh, no!” Margorie murmured in a shocked voice. “I don’t think they’re
engaged, are they?”

“I don’t mean Bob Anstruther and Lucy,” Elvira said impatiently, “but
Philip—Philip and Lucy?”

Margorie made a little movement of distaste. “I didn’t stay to see,” she
said a little dryly. “I wasn’t going to watch them. I suppose they had a
right to talk there if they liked. People do come and see each other as
soon as they can after a hurricane. The wires are down, there’s no other
way of telling whether your friends are alive or dead. Anyhow, it was
getting dark, and when I left they were just where they were when I
came, and not saying anything. I expect they were both very tired.
They’d done a lot.”

Elvira hesitated, but she felt she could risk no more—she must
reinstate herself rather than endanger what ground she had already won.
Instead of again referring to Philip or Lucy she said in a low, moved
voice, “You don’t know what I felt at the Gap—when I ran for help. To
leave you behind, that was what nearly killed me. But I knew you were
right to go back, just as I was to go on. Each of us was doing what had
to be done.” Elvira had, of course, left Margorie without a qualm; but
there was a grain of truth in what she said: the qualm had come later
when she was herself in security—she had felt sorry for Margorie then,
though even in her anxiety there had been a vindictive streak of
derision. Why should these skin-sheltered, white girls never face
danger? Let them taste what she had so often tasted. They were even
allowed the innocence so often denied to their destitute dark sisters.
They did not have to sell their bodies for food or clothes—no one dared
attack them with violence or bribe them to give up their chastity
because they were starved. Let the wind take them and their unexposed
frail bodies. Let even Margorie, who was her willing servant, know
horror; and let Lucy, who opposed Elvira’s ambitions and her heart
alike, know the sharpness of death. Deep in these angry thoughts, she
was startled as well as relieved when Margorie’s lips found her hand and
kissed it in passionate contrition.

Elvira rose to her feet. She had for the moment done what she had
intended, and with triumphant success. But it was not a safe thing to
have told that last redeeming lie. No one who has lied to save himself
can ever feel quite secure.

Truth, though it has many disadvantages, is at least changeless. You can
always find it where you left it.

Elvira kissed her young friend more successfully this time, and with
greater tenderness. She could afford to be tender now she had won back
her slave, but there was a slight feeling of discomfort beneath Elvira’s
triumph. A slave is not wholly within a tyrant’s power when she may
still discover the truth. For truth has another attribute besides
immutability, it has the power to set slaves free.




                             _CHAPTER XXXV_


Philip drove into St. George’s at 5:00 A.M. and operated all day long at
the hospital. They had saved some conservative operations for him,
tedious and dangerous jobs, so that he had to concentrate upon them,
without the intrusion of personal grief.

It was the day of the Grand Hotel dance. Half of Philip bent, sweating
and calculating, over the operating table, the other half felt like a
piece of dried-up seaweed on a blazing beach. Skill kept his thoughts at
the disposal of his hands, but nothing stirred the deadness of his
heart. If he hadn’t known that he was juggling with death, and hadn’t
been trained by habit, even his attention would have been beyond his own
control.

He operated from nine till one o’clock, and, after an hour’s break,
again till seven. The last hour or two he felt like an actor at the end
of a long run, who just walks on and lets the right words drop out of
his mouth. Philip had never before operated on patients without thinking
about them. The last ounce in a surgeon comes from knowing the body he
is working on is a person, and today this last ounce in Philip was
missing.

An unconscious human body had always been to him the shell of an
individual spirit. He had never let go of his pity, he had kept it in
cold storage, as part of the source of his skill.

But today even his sense of common humanity failed him. His theater
nurse fainted and he said impatiently, “Cart her away and bring me
another one.” He was on the verge of forgetting his usual kindly
reminder, “Count the sponges, Sister.” It was her business and her
responsibility to count them, yet Philip always remembered that on the
Island the sense of responsibility was weak and infantile because
responsibility had been for so long denied its native people, so that he
added his assistants’ basic responsibilities to his own.

Nothing terrible happened, but Philip, leaving the theater, felt ashamed
to know that none of his fellow workers had worked as well as usual
because he himself had been halfhearted. Everything had been a little
harder on the patients and his assistants than it need have been, there
was no satisfactory sense of finish at the work’s end, which is the
surgeon’s best reward.

While he was washing up, Philip was told that Mr. O’San was waiting for
him. He had just been wondering how he could drive home, dripping with
sweat and trembling like a girl, and how he could face the night so
close to Everslade, which would be empty. “I just _didn’t_ kill anyone
on the table today,” Philip said to Mr. O’San with a wry smile as he got
into the old man’s battered car, “but it was a tossup.”

“How much life do you think some of your patients have to take?” O’San
asked him mildly. “What good can it do them to be let out again once you
have cured them, to starve in these streets?”

The main thoroughfare of the businesslike slum, which was St. George’s
city, was crowded with leaf-thin, jostling inhabitants. The dust of the
long hot day still powdered the golden air, but at last the burning
weight of the sun—the heavy feeling across the neck and shoulders—had
lifted. The air coming in from the sea had the vague coolness of
approaching night. The beggars and thieves—and most beggars who had a
chance to steal were thieves in St. George’s city—the all day and half
the night loiterers, were tasting their only stimulant except rum, the
dark. Night was their cloak for crime and their cover for misery. There
was a sort of shuffling, furtive movement in the streets, as if the
ragged and destitute inhabitants were enjoying their secret freedom.

“Why did you call for me tonight?” Philip asked, turning his head aside
from the sudden brilliance of the Grand Hotel, alive with light upon the
gleaming edge of the dark sea.

“Myra is with me,” O’San answered. “It was her idea—she said she wanted
to have you with us tonight. After all, she has not seen you since the
hurricane, and for a child such a storm is a great matter—it cannot be
forgotten in a fortnight.”

“It can be forgotten very easily by grownup people,” Philip said with
bitterness. “They dance, over there, on our destruction.”

“To put in our pockets a thousand pounds out of theirs they must spend
what, if added to it, might be yet more helpful,” Mr. O’San murmured
soothingly. “But we should not forget that there is a kindness behind
it—for a thousand pounds is kindness, even if six or eight hundred have
to go into their feet and stomachs first.”

Philip made no answer, but he drew his breath more easily when they had
passed the glare of the hotel and settled into the usual dimness of the
suburbs.

“I could do with all the drink you’ve got,” Philip told O’San as the old
man drew up at his door, but he felt farther away from Lucy in Bob
Anstruther’s arms than he had felt all day.

Myra came down the steps of her father’s home with the scent of jasmine
in her satin-smooth hair. They sat on the veranda in the peaceful dark,
while O’San went to fetch his cooled wine from his cellar.

“You should have stopped Lucy going to the dance,” Myra told Philip
quietly. “If you had told her what it meant to you she would not have
gone.”

“What is the use of telling a person what he should know without being
told?” Philip asked her wearily. “Lucy would have thought, however
docile and kindhearted her obedience was to my wish, ‘He is a jealous
Negro.’ The real tragedy of Othello is not that Desdemona was innocent,
but that Othello knew that if she wasn’t, he was to blame for the wreck
of her innocence by an unwise marriage. The lover did not matter, but
being the wrong husband for that unsheltered loveliness made any lover
matter. I shall not make that mistake now with Lucy.”

Myra sat on a mat at Philip’s feet in silence, but a little shiver went
through her, as if she felt the night was cold. O’San came back with his
finest wine and three tall glasses and when he began to talk it was
about world affairs, and Philip felt eased by this cosmic interlude, and
glad that neither of them could see his face, caught in its conflict
between passion and reason.

“This little Island,” O’San said reflectively, “is a microcosm of the
planet we are on, and what a small thing—on this still night under the
stars—our little planet feels! Sometimes the sense of trouble on this
Island beats up so strongly from the distant beaches that I expect to
see the whole thing rip apart. I see twenty thousand skeletons
surrounding a few large houses where people like us feel our bodies
pleasantly inhabited—tearing them to pieces. Nor do I blame them. And
yet I know that we three belong to a trained and loyal group, who mean
to give their lives to remedying this contrast, if they give us time. I
do not blame us either, therefore, though perhaps because we are so
comfortable we prolong the time lag. Sometimes I understand very well
Whiteleaf’s way, that of a Communist, an impatience to pull down our
false economics with violence before we have learned to be voluntary
Communists _without_ violence. When we have educated ourselves to be
good human beings we shall have the right economics; but this the
Communists ignore, they are in too much of a hurry to match their
methods to their aim. We, on our part, have not educated our rulers. We
believe too easily in civilization, while its most successful
representatives disport themselves on our beaches, saturated with
alcohol which they cannot even taste and making love to preposterous and
savage ladies whom they bring or find there, and get rid of after their
pockets have been picked and their tempers scratched. If the white race
gets wiped out, as after the next war they are likely to be by the
larger continents, and what is left of the small European rubbish heap
is in charge of Asiatics and Africans, do you honestly think it will be
so great a misfortune? A bath when you’re hot, a drink when you’re
thirsty, cover when it rains—couldn’t we manage to provide them, even
if our complexions are a trifle darker than those geniuses whose
plumbing system and skill in mixing alcohols we so much admire?”

Philip knew that Mr. O’San spoke like this only partly because he
believed it, but chiefly because he wanted to make Philip feel Lucy less
desirable. He smiled a little in the dark, yet his brain stirred to meet
the argument. He could feel Myra’s shoulders against his knees. She was
a dear child and he loved her. He felt that her heart was always on his
side, and because even though she was a child she was also a woman, he
wanted to show himself braver than he felt.

“I have no particular reason for wishing the white race to survive its
inventions,” he admitted, “but I can’t help remembering that the people
we most prize are part of their build-up. Anything we believe, and
perhaps feebly practice, of personal freedom and the rights of man comes
from them. We may overwhelm the West, but first they will have taken
their captor prisoner. It is on their thoughts that ours will be based.
When we have destroyed them we shall find, the rest of us, Africans,
Chinese, Indians, and the other peoples, that we have all gone West.”

“Let us hope it will be soon,” O’San replied, “before too many wars have
reduced us—and our planet with us—to insignificance. I admit Europeans
have taught us something. Man is an educatable animal. They may even yet
teach themselves enough to avoid extinction. We can all perform more
than we know, but we do not yet seem to me fit for our responsibilities
as human beings.”

“Perhaps,” Philip admitted, “we have only reached the adolescent stage,
and think of ourselves as grownup before we actually are. But what man
can be we have learned mainly from the West. Socrates, Jesus Christ—a
Western God, even though a man born in the East—Galileo, Giordano
Bruno, Shakespeare, Newton, Dante, Goethe, Voltaire, Lincoln—a mixed
bag. And I should slip into it Adler and Freud, though most men of my
profession would put them the wrong way round, preferring—as secretly
we all still prefer—the freed libido of a spoiled child to the
inferiority sense of a responsible human being, who learns by his
mistakes that he has a psychic factor which can correct them.

“I have a feeling that to whatever use we put the atom, in the way of
childish destruction, some of those particular values will outlast the
cataclysm. We shall get rid of these dictatorships from Right and Left
and forget who Hitler and Stalin were once they are safely dead.
‘Nature,’ as Adler used to say, ‘is a good scavenger. She gets rid of
her rubbish.’ But these other names she will not forget she will have
learned them by heart.”

Mr. O’San opened a second bottle. “This wine,” he said, “like many of
man’s best and dearest thoughts, comes direct from France. Nor did I
sign papers for it. A boat landed one night and I was on the rocks with
money, and the next day there was a handful of refugees, a little better
off than refugees usually are, and a trifle safer.”

“You are a bad old man, and this is a very fine wine,” Philip told him
with a chuckle. “If we had to pass under the cloud of a new dictatorship
through your friends the Communists I think that we should miss this
wine, and that we would soon find we have less memorable names to guide
us forward, rather than more.”

“Oh, it is good to remember ancestors,” O’San agreed, “although our
nation has had this habit rather too long, some of us think.
Money—power and prestige—these are what destroy us. Perhaps homo
sapiens needs a harder and stronger medicine against them than he has
yet found for himself.”

“Perhaps,” Philip agreed. “But although homo sapiens has made many bad
choices as long as he can still choose he may do better next time. What
is at stake today is his right to choose. Take that away from him and
any animal is happier and more at peace than man. Your friend the
Communist would take away from me the only right I believe in, the
freedom to create. Don’t think I should not choose a purer and more
honest democracy than we get here, but given time without violence it is
what I believe we shall all willingly accept. Science has taught me that
man has no limitations and need never be dependent on dictatorships, and
the same is true of religion and beauty. I believe in free contribution
toward the common good. It is being _forced_ into an involuntary
communism against which I should fight. No man—and what is a dictator
but a man, a power-drunk man at that?—no man is fit for unchecked power
over his fellows!”

O’San chuckled. “You speak well, Philip,” he said kindly. “But where do
you get your antediluvian notions of man’s individual worth from—your
hospitals?”

“Two nuns changed my hospital on Black River the other day from a
pandemonium of fear and horror into a quiet place of peace. They did
this with little outward aid in the center of a hurricane. Quakers,
Presbyterians, Baptists, Seventh-Day Adventists, Methodists, even a few
Anglicans—whatever these religions call themselves here on the
Island—have they done our people no good? Round each one of these
hard-working, positive Christians there is a nucleus of decent living,
education and hygiene. Can you deny it?” Philip asked.

“No. I should not deny it,” the old man said after a pause. “Nor should
I deny that three hundred years of government by a so-called Christian
state has reduced this Island, once a very livable and lovable place,
into the shambles it is today. I cannot pat Christianity on the back. I
am prepared to admit that some people may get some good out of it, but
more people get harm from thinking they believe it, than from not
believing it. They lean on God instead of on themselves. They look for a
distant heaven instead of attending to the earth which it is their job
to make habitable. No, Philip, I do not want to disappoint you, but when
I look for fellow workmen to make a better world, I do not start
knocking on the door of the Christian fold. For one thing it is not
sheep that I am counting on to change the face of life.”

“Do you really want to change the face of life?” Philip asked him. “I am
much less ambitious. I only want to wash it. I like life, and I more
than like it, I believe in it. Do you think life will do nothing to help
us toward the changes we need? Can we not educate our children away from
money and prestige and believe that they, too, will find a further
contribution once we have given them a better chance to find it?”
Suddenly the head at his knee moved.

“Father,” Myra said, “it is late. Our grandmother waits to say good
night to you. She thinks only in Chinese,” she explained to Philip as
without a word her father rose and went into the house, “and so she did
not join us. Philip, why did you let Whiteleaf go? Was it because about
these things you thought so differently?”

“I never let her go,” Philip said softly. “She is with me still. This is
our secret. I tell it only to you because you loved her. I shall never
let anyone else know. Not even Lucy—if ever again I tell her anything.
Lucy didn’t take Whiteleaf’s place with me but she did something to me
that Whiteleaf has never done. She put the whole of herself into me.
That’s why I can’t understand about this dance.”

“To you,” Myra said softly, “life and this dance are one, all that you
do is one, Philip. You are like that, but with Lucy it is not so. She
sees life perhaps not so clearly as you do, and this dance is separate
for her. It is a thing she can do outside her real life and forget.”

“She knows he’s my enemy,” Philip objected sternly. “How can she not
remember what her contact with him must mean to me?”

“I think she will remember,” Myra told him softly, but with deep
conviction. “She will remember and will understand. It is like what you
have been saying to us, Philip, understanding each other is not quick,
and it is not all you or all Lucy, it is also life. Be good to her in
your mind—for I think she is very good to you in hers!”

“How do you know, Myra,” Philip demanded. “Have you talked with her
about me?”

“Yes, we have talked,” Myra admitted after a pause. She got up and stood
beside Philip, near but not touching him. “Now, I too must go and say
good night to my grandmother,” she told him, her voice shaking a little.
“Because in China—though I shall perhaps never go there, yet I think
like a Chinese—they never forget what belongs to each person, even if
it is only a very little thing like saying good night.”




                            _CHAPTER XXXVI_


Happiness clung around Lucy like a golden mist. Every bird’s song set
her heart flying upward to join its flight. The blue diaphanous sky, the
red earth teaming with tropical life were all part of the rhythm of her
love for Philip. Every tree and blossom were like his signature across a
page. He was in the air she breathed and responsible for the freshness
of all returning life. The strain of her hostile relationship with
Elvira failed to register as a sensation. The school itself faded into a
strange transparency. Her love for Philip even blotted out Philip
himself.

The aftermath of the hurricane kept them apart. Philip was working from
morning to night, but the only word he managed to send her, “Go on
thinking till I get to you,” was enough for Lucy’s heart to feed on. It
did not occur to her in the intensity of her wordless communion with him
that he might resent her promise to Bob about the dance. This ball was
to be the last act of her single life. After it she meant irretrievably
and permanently to break with the past. She doubted if her committee
would even retain her services. Lucy was content to pay the price for
her love but it seemed unnecessary to explain to Philip that she was
paying it. She shrank from writing to a man immersed in putting together
bodies broken by the hurricane that dancing had been the method chosen
by her own people in order to pay for the damage; yet she was still part
of them, and it did not seem strange to Lucy, as it would have seemed to
Philip, that she should join them in this curious blend of compassion
and personal exhilaration expressed by a Charity Ball. It was Bob rather
than Philip who stirred Lucy’s conscience. There would have to be a bad
moment before they parted, when she told Bob she was going to marry
Philip Calgary.

Poor old Bob, he would hate it, but at least he must already know his
feeling for her was hopeless. She needn’t tell him till just at the end
of the dance, and wouldn’t it be better, she rather speciously asked
herself, to put a final stop to all such misdirected cravings? Bob would
get over his disappointment. He was attractive to women and the best
match on the Island. Both his spirit and his body had been trained to
meet adversity in a hard school. He wouldn’t, Lucy told herself, mind
for too long anything that happened to him.

Bob and Judy called for Lucy, early in the day in Bob’s smart sports
car, and they drove to St. George’s together in a gale of laughter. Bob
and Judy not only understood what Lucy said, they shared what she meant.
Their flippant indecencies were founded on a common code, and could only
be risked in each other’s company. There was nothing too bad to say or
too good to be believed in their untrammeled presence.

The dust and squalor of St. George’s opened suddenly into a green
portal. Ices climbed in tall glasses, verandas spread out of rooms that
were themselves almost verandas. Lawns of incandescent green sloped
toward the fiery sparkle of the sea. Birds sang and darted through
shimmering leaves. Every token of the storm had been obliterated. The
Grand Hotel was an enclosed Garden of Eden. “Now you see what money does
for you,” Bob said, driving up to the open, flower-encircled door,
“quite a lot of money or else—!”

It wasn’t really strange, Lucy told herself, to find no message from
Philip.

Lucy was determined to enjoy this dance. She could hardly keep her feet
still when the music began. Bob had warned her that he was going to
dance with her the whole evening, and except for a polite dance with
each of her hosts in turn, this was exactly what happened. Bob liked
dancing. He carried the music in his blood with the dance steps that he
invented to match it.

Economically and with precision he gave to the whole affair the delicate
calculation of a good chess player. All he asked of his partner was
suppleness and attention, and the moment Lucy caught Bob’s rhythm she
knew by instinct her part of the pattern. “What a mercy your muscles
work to music,” Bob said in a satisfied voice when the music stopped.
“There are girls with lovely figures who jam into you like pieces of
wood. You’d think their minds and feet belonged to different people. But
you’re all right, you roll on, like Old Man River, all of a piece. Now
we’ll go off into the garden for a breather and get the drink we
deserve.”

The darkness of the velvet night spangled with its own stars looked no
more real than the trees hung with Chinese lanterns on the immaculately
brushed lawns, nor did the lanterns among the liquid gray-green leaves
look less real than the stars.

“Now,” Bob said with a long sigh of content, lighting Lucy’s cigarette
from his own, before sinking into a chair facing the sea, “I feel as if
we’d got somewhere—but it’s up to you to tell me where we’ve got to.”

This was the bad moment that Lucy had known must come. She drank from
the tall, frosted glass in front of her, glad for once that it hadn’t
been just lime juice she’d ordered. Bob had chosen chairs at a distance
from the path. They were alone with the night and she must make the best
of it. They couldn’t have a better or more private moment for giving or
receiving blows. It was a pity she liked him so much, and that they knew
the way about each other’s minds so well. She put out her half-smoked
cigarette. It wasn’t any use trying to soothe nerves that by now knew
they couldn’t be soothed or soothing.

“We’ve got to where we always were,” she said at last, “and there can’t
ever be anywhere else to get to, Bob. I want you to realize this is not
for us. We’ve had it. Perhaps I oughtn’t to say it because it sounds
like a kind of excuse, but it’s true: you and your mother are like my
home to me, the one I lost in the blitz. I thought there weren’t any
people like my own people till I met you. I love you both the same, and
when I hurt you it’s myself I hurt.”

“Well, you don’t need to,” Bob said reassuringly. “What’s wrong with
that for a start? I don’t expect the tropics yet. I’ll work for them.
What I’m offering you _is_ a home.”

“You don’t understand,” Lucy said, her voice shaking. “I’m terribly in
love. I thought you guessed I was at Free Waters, when you kissed me and
it didn’t click. That was when I knew first myself. It’s my only excuse,
I _didn’t_ know till then. And I couldn’t stop the hurricane, could
I—and your coming over to help? Bob, I’m—I’m frightfully sorry. You’ve
been terribly sweet to me and given me the Island, and I’ve done
damn-all back.”

Silence dropped between them as if it were a solid substance too heavy
to be pushed away. Bob’s face, which Lucy could see quite plainly from
the lantern’s light, had not changed, only the fire in his eyes had gone
out. He looked neither sad nor angry. He kept the poker face of an
airman who has just been briefed for an operation so hazardous as to
preclude a return. Lucy knew what airmen felt when they looked like
that—firm and sick at the same time, and with no way of escape open to
them.

He said at last, “Someone new then—on the Island? I’m prepared for
those old ghosts who can’t let you go—I think I can deal with them—but
who else is there?”

“It’s Philip Calgary,” Lucy told him. Her voice failed her, and her eyes
filled with tears.

The happy dream of eating her cake and having it broke once and for all
before her eyes. “Good God!” Bob said under his breath. “Are you sure?”
He turned his head and stared at Lucy, his eyes full of incredulous,
horrified anger. “You can’t marry a black man on this island!” he
exclaimed. “You must be stark staring mad, Lucy, to think of it!”

“Have you ever got over _not_ marrying Jenny?” Lucy asked him, her eyes
suddenly grown dry and her voice like a knife’s edge. “Ask yourself
_that_ question before I answer yours!” Bob plunged his head in his
hands, and then flung it back and sat up as straight as if he were
holding himself to be shot. “They had no earthly right,” he said in a
savage undertone, “to be so damned good-looking.”

“But it hasn’t only to do with looks,” Lucy told him impatiently. “There
are some people who _are_ what they look like! I don’t know about Jenny
because I never met her, but I do know about Nancy Peck, who if I were a
man I’d have the sense to want to marry. Philip isn’t just good-looking,
he’s the most kind, the most alert and brave, the gentlest, straightest
man I’ve ever met—like Michael, only not a bit like him, cleverer and
more fun—and anyhow—he’s Philip. It might have taken me longer to love
him if he’d been plain, but it would have been the same in the end. I
couldn’t _not_ love him. Bob, it’s horrible to hurt you. It was horrible
of me to come to this dance at all. I know now _how_ horrible, not only
to you but to Philip, but I didn’t know till you looked at me like that,
that it had to be so horrible!”

“Well, you know _now_,” Bob said grimly. “You can’t go straying along
having fun and games with everyone’s scalps fastened to your apron
strings and everything in the garden lovely. Any heart you happen to
fancy, any face, any color, any poor damned torturable bloke you can get
your bloody hooks into—!”

“I never meant—” Lucy began, then she stopped. What had she meant? She
had meant to be as happy as she could, not to lose any one of those
immense advantages her looks and her luck had given her. She had meant
to exploit them all and to maintain her credit for decency and fair play
while she was doing it. She saw what she had done to both the men who
loved her and why she had done it. She had done it to please herself.

She said nothing. She sat with her head bowed and her hands clasped
tightly together in her lap. If she cried, she told herself, she would
only make it more tiresome for Bob, yet there was no answer to anything
Bob had said but tears.

She thought perhaps if she kept quite still he would get up and leave
her. As much as she could still want anything, Lucy wanted to be left
alone, but Bob too sat quite still, looking away from Lucy at the dark,
uneasy sea, ribbed with rays of artificial light. At last he spoke, and
his voice sounded as if all the personal part of his anger had gone out
of him, leaving something far more serious behind. “Look here, Lucy,” he
said quietly, “it’s no use our letting fly at each other. It would have
been easier, perhaps, if we hadn’t had this dance together, but I
shouldn’t have given you up anyhow till I knew it was hopeless. I never
meant to marry a woman before—not from the first, quite steadily, as if
there were nothing else. But all that’s not so steep, though I’ve still
got to face it. I could take it, I suppose, if it were all there is to
it. It isn’t even that the man you like better than me happens to be
Philip Calgary. I hate his guts, of course, and he hates mine, so
whatever you hoped about our staying friends, if you _did_ hope it, has
got to be washed out. I’d never willingly set eyes on you again—as
Philip Calgary’s wife. God! It’s unthinkable! But this color snag you’ve
run into isn’t simply a matter of personal choice. If it had been I
should have married Jenny. I loved her quite enough to take any personal
risk.

“But it’s not all tripe, what we fought for, is it? We liked England
enough not to want Hitler messing about with it, telling us where we got
off and all that—or didn’t we?”

“No, it wasn’t all tripe,” Lucy agreed in a low, pained voice.

“Well,” Bob went on, lighting a fresh cigarette for them both, but not,
though he tried to, bringing any greater ease into the sound of his
voice. “There isn’t much I don’t know about the West Indies, white or
black. My people have lived at Free Waters for two hundred years. When I
came back—after Europe, I looked at things afresh as you might say, and
I saw that what is going on here now is dangerous. This is our Island,
we British people fought for it, planted it, and have held it for three
hundred years. You can’t only take the black side of it, though I grant
you they helped us to work it, and we forced them here for that purpose.
I’m not trying to get out of what we did to them, nor saying they
haven’t the same rights on the Island that we have, but I don’t think
they have any greater rights.

“They used _not_ to hate us, though how we got on together was nobody’s
business. But it worked. You ask the MacTaggerts, even they’ll tell you
the same. Thirty years ago, twenty years ago, it used to work. Our own
place always had willing workers. Now we’re on bad terms with the same
people. We haven’t changed. It’s the Communists that have got hold of
them. There’s a perpetually increasing influence on this island, putting
black against white. They hate us so hard, our own people, and so deep
that they might any day try to wipe us out, then our troops at the Gap
would come down and shoot. That’s what they’re there for. They know it,
and we know it. It’s all that keeps the blacks quiet—and perhaps it
won’t always be enough. Which side would you be on then, Lucy, if you
were to marry Philip Calgary?”

Lucy gasped. “But why should I take sides?” she demanded. “Why should
they fight us? Couldn’t they get to hate us less if we understood them
better?”

“They’d fight to drive us neck and crop out of what they think of as
_their_ Island, just as we fought the Spaniards once and drove them into
the sea,” Bob told her. “Some of them might fight _for_ us, but Philip
Calgary wouldn’t be one of them! He and his friend that damn clever chap
Ransom would lead any black man that listens to him against us. And
thousands _do_ listen. You’ll just have to choose, just as you’ve had to
choose a husband, between Calgary and me. Which _island_ do you care for
most, England or the one we’re on now? Because I warn you, it will be a
hell of a party when it comes, and quite senseless, because this Island
is too small to run itself without us. If we do get kicked out, Russia
or America would take over. Anyhow, that’s the setout. Do you see now
what marrying Philip Calgary means?”

Lucy looked at Bob. She felt as if her heart were being slowly squeezed
out of her body by his hands. “Bob,” she said at last, “you know I
_feel_ English, don’t you—as English as you feel yourself? I don’t know
any other way to feel. I just _am_ English. I _must_ care for England
more than for any other place—wherever I am or whatever I do!”

“I know what you stand for,” Bob admitted grudgingly. “We all know your
war record. We were proud of having you here with us. Every white man or
woman on the Island is out to respect you. That’s what you stand to
lose, Lucy, the respect of your own people.”

“But that isn’t what matters most to me now,” Lucy said after a long
pause. “It _does_ matter, of course—I should hate to lose anyone’s
respect. But not _most_—what matters most is what I’m losing it _for_.
If I’m English, I don’t fight only for a piece of land I took and
somebody else claims, but for what—while it belongs to me—best serves
it. If I’m valuable to these dark people we made ourselves responsible
for by bringing here, then I must serve them. You admit we forced them
here. We released them from slavery at last, but we couldn’t give them
back their heritage. We still have to help them rule themselves, and now
that so many of them are as educated as we are, and as valuable as we
are, we must learn to work _with_ them as well as for them. There
mustn’t be any more force. We _are_ forcing them still because of their
hunger, and a lot of them _aren’t_ yet educated. We support our big
industrialists, who govern them through hunger. Money _is_ force as well
as soldiers on the hillside. We’ve not given that way up, though it _is_
the wrong way. So I think they’re right or might be right if they
revolted against it.”

“He _has_ injected you with his communism then, has he?” Bob demanded
bitterly.

“Philip is not a Communist,” Lucy said firmly, “because Communists
believe in force and in the end always use it. There are English people
as well as dark people on the Island who feel just as I do and who would
act as I suppose I would act if I had to choose, and these are Philip’s
friends as much as they’re mine. I think it would be a mistake for the
dark people on the Island to try to drive the white ones off by force. I
still think we can work it out together. I think we ought to try, but it
isn’t color that matters, whether I married Philip or not, it’s what is
beneath our color—it’s our _real_ selves!

“People used to think women weren’t real selves either and hadn’t any
rights, but they’ve changed. Without a war, men are giving us equal
rights, and it’s the same with black people and white. We can stop
looking down on them, without a war if we want to, and if there’s time.
Do you really respect me less because that’s what I think, Bob?”

Bob put his hands on her shoulders. They stood up, facing each other.
“It’s the way things are,” he said heavily. “You’ll lose us, Judy and me
and all the rest of us. And how do you know that you won’t lose Philip,
too? There’s a much wider gulf between black and white than you imagine.
I tell you, Lucy, you just don’t know what _hate_ there is in the hearts
of these people. I often lie awake at night and sweat, thinking of the
white women and their children whom we couldn’t save and of the black
people we should have to shoot—to check a massacre. Would you like it
if we were driven off the Island and you were left behind?”

The tears ran down Lucy’s cheeks, but she whispered through her tears,
“I haven’t got to like everything any more, Bob. I only have to stick to
what I like best.”




                            _CHAPTER XXXVII_


Lucy stared at the letter that lay before her, propped against a
harmless glass of orange juice, as if it were poison. It was Philip’s
writing. He knew that she was at the Grand Hotel for the night, and that
she had gone to the Anstruthers’ ball. There was nothing else he knew.
Not what she had thought about it when Bob invited her, before her love
for Philip was an accepted fact, nor what she felt about it now, when
the ball appeared to her, as it must have appeared to Philip, as a cruel
insult. They had not been one person thinking of a thing one way, they
had been two persons thinking of a thing in two different ways. They
were inescapably different.

    “Dear Mrs. Armstrong,” Philip wrote in his firm, clear
    handwriting in which every letter was formed in its fixed and
    final shape. “I am sending a formal resignation of my attendance
    at Everslade to your committee. Since the hurricane my work in
    the two hospitals I serve has been so pressing that I have
    decided, for this and for other reasons, not to return to the
    school. The children now in hospital at the Gap are all
    recovering, and Henriette can well continue at Everslade under
    your care with the usual medical supervision required by her
    case. Yours sincerely, Philip Calgary.”

Lucy was free now of all conflicts. She would not have to give up her
rights and privileges as an Englishwoman. She need not resign her
school, or have an African mother-in-law, or become the mother of a
Negro’s child. She would not have to give up anything except her
self-respect. Somewhere along the line of her life she knew that she had
failed the human being she most loved. Philip’s heart was no longer hers
to release into a world of freedom and delight. She felt like an old
woman with a young face. Nothing in her responded to the empty
reflection in the mirror.

She moved stiffly to and fro about the hotel bedroom, dressing, packing
her suitcase, drinking her orange juice. She could hear other voices,
steps along the passage, an altercation between a waiter and a
chambermaid carried on outside her door. She knew she was alive, but she
thought a hotel bedroom was the loneliest place on earth.

At last Lucy crept downstairs and paid her bill. Now she had not even
the right to be hidden in her loneliness. She had to take it out to the
steps of the veranda to be stared at by lascivious-eyed loafers till she
made up her mind what to do next and where to go. Everslade, of course,
but she had not brought her car. She had come with the Anstruthers and
it was impossible to ask the Anstruthers to take her home.

There was a slight commotion in the crowded drive. The decorated and
ubiquitous hotel porter was trying to prevent the arrival of a shabby
and battered car at the pompous hotel entrance. The car was moving very
slowly but definitely forward. The driver seemed not to have heard the
raised voice or seen the menace of the porter’s uplifted hand. His
smooth and pleasant face was smiling, his eyes and lips crinkled at the
corners, his black, satin-smooth head was somehow vaguely familiar to
Lucy’s eyes. She thought of a seal pushing itself against waves with
effortless determination onto a steep rock, and then she knew with a
leap of her dulled heart that she was looking at Mr. O’San.

She ran down the steps and flung herself onto the seat beside him. “Is
it really you?” she stammered eagerly. “Did you come to fetch me?” Mr.
O’San smiled vaguely. The dismayed, reluctant porter gave him his right
of way, thinking to himself, “How can we ever understand the English
when they not only behave not like other people but also not like
themselves?” For everyone had told him how important Lucy was and he
could see for himself how expensively clad, and there she was, sitting
with obvious satisfaction by the side of that yellow, oily-faced chink.

Mr. O’San steered peacefully between an oncoming Rolls-Royce and an
immense Packard before answering Lucy, then he said, “I had business in
the city, and I am very happy if I may act as your escort home. It is
true that this car I drive is an obscene, despicable vehicle not worthy
of your presence, but I prefer to possess two such cars that can go on
looking like tin cans rather than one car, however resplendent, which
might be laid up.”

Mr. O’San drove with the cautious incredulity of one who has taken to
driving automobiles late in life, but with unruffled nerves.

“I didn’t know what to do,” Lucy murmured, “till I saw you. It was
horrible standing there. Everyone in St. George’s looks as if they long
to commit crimes and can’t! I don’t know which is worse, to want to be
bad or not to be _able_ to be bad if you do want to, but to be both
together is just awful.”

“Very few people are very rich in this town, and very many people are
terribly poor,” Mr. O’San said thoughtfully. “When these are separate
facts one forgets that it does not make sense. When they are together
one sees clearly it is a nonsense and leads to crime. But what to do
about such a nonsense is not so clear.”

Mr. O’San knew what was the matter with Lucy but it did not seem to him
the moment to deal with it. It was like seeing a bird with a broken
wing; you must not touch what is broken until you have won the bird’s
confidence. Lucy must be made sure that Mr. O’San would not come
anywhere near what she was suffering, and then later on she might let
him try to mend it. So he began to talk to her about the history of the
Island. He pointed out to her the houses where great men, great forces
or great criminals, had lived. He was full of stories about the events
and characters of the past, and as she listened Lucy’s heart became
quieter. She could bear to talk about anything in the world except the
ball—or Philip. Against these two rocks her heart was tossed by waves
of emotion she could only just control, if no one noticed that she was
controlling them. She even enjoyed finding that she could share Mr.
O’San’s field of unoccupied knowledge without flinching.

“There must be quite a lot of other places I can see and things I can
think about which _don’t_ remind me of Philip,” she told herself
reassuringly, while the next wave of agony gathered itself together to
break against her heart. She wished that they could drive forever and
arrive nowhere, while Mr. O’San went on telling her long, inimitable
tales of human vicissitudes which were none of them in the least like
her own.

But with terrible rapidity the short two hours passed and they stopped
outside the roofless annex. “I have, by a happy chance, heard from
Whiteleaf this morning,” Mr. O’San remarked. “She has arrived in China,
and found at once work for which she is well fitted. If I may, I will
ask you to give her letter to Myra. It will make her very happy.”

It was no use trying to avoid it any more, the great wave struck. Lucy
found herself saying between shaking lips, “Why didn’t Philip go _with_
her to China!”

Mr. O’San took out a cloth and carefully wiped his windscreen free from
dust. “Perhaps,” he mentioned cautiously, “because he did not want to
go. It is the most frequent reason I find, why energetic and direct
people such as Philip act. What they want to do they do, nothing stops
them, and what they do not want to do, in the same determined and
energetic manner they leave undone.”

“But it isn’t any use his staying now,” Lucy said desperately, “he won’t
ever see me again—he might just as well be in China with Whiteleaf—all
because I went to that senseless, cruel dance!”

Mr. O’San sat so quietly that he almost seemed not to be in the car at
all, but just to have left his rather shiny old black alpaca suit on the
seat beside Lucy. “Perhaps it was not a very good reason for a dance—a
hurricane,” he admitted, “and that you went to it may have been a
pity—but we can easily exaggerate. You are both young and in love, and
both live upon a not unlimited island. Neither of you has an
irrecoverable illness nor has yet been sentenced to lifelong
imprisonment. I can imagine worse situations for lovers than yours.”

“No, you can’t,” Lucy said sharply. “His pride’s worse than an illness
and what I did was stupider than any crime. Philip won’t stand it and
he’s quite right not to. Bob was his enemy. He can’t see that what I
felt about Bob was _different_! You see, the Bob I knew wasn’t that
_kind_ of a Bob at all. There wasn’t any Jenny when I first met him, and
when I knew that there _had_ been, and that she was Philip’s sister, Bob
told me himself and I could see just how it happened and how horribly it
had hurt him. Just as badly, really, as if he’d drowned himself like she
did. It wasn’t all his fault—it was the war and his mother and
everything. I know now that it wasn’t my business what Bob felt, because
I didn’t love him, but you can’t quite cut yourself off like that when
you’ve been through a war together. I was all the time with men like
Bob, trying to help them—I couldn’t _stop_ liking Bob. When one person
gets killed, you have to feel just as sorry for the person who _didn’t_
get killed, don’t you? I didn’t get killed myself, so I know how it
hurts _not_ to be. But Philip doesn’t see any of that—he only thinks I
am arrogant and cruel and wanting to get scalps and be popular, and
he’ll go on thinking it always now—and it’s just what Myra said, he
won’t _have_ Whiteleaf or me or anyone.”

“Philip too may have made a little mistake,” Mr. O’San said soothingly.

“No, he didn’t! He was perfectly right,” Lucy contradicted. “I see that
now, but I couldn’t then—but what he won’t see is that I _cared_.”

“Philip also cares, I think,” Mr. O’San murmured reflectively, “and that
is sometimes confusing for a very proud very single-minded young man.
His heart and his mind do not always tell him the same thing at the same
time, so he does not act with wholeness—which is always a pity. Still,
you can see the _direction_ in which he acts. He will not go after
Whiteleaf to China. He remains where he is. No doubt he says to you and
to himself that everything is finished between you and that he will not
see you again. Yet he remains where it is very unlikely that he will
_not_ see you again, and he does not go to China—where it would be far
more possible to avoid seeing you and where he would certainly have the
very good company of our friend Whiteleaf.”

“How could I have done such a thing?” Lucy demanded. “Such a cruel,
senseless thing? Even if he forgives me, and I know he won’t, how can I
forgive myself, and how can I be sure I mightn’t be just as stupid
again?”

“Oh, that, of course, is not one of our securities,” Mr. O’San agreed,
“not to be stupid again! How angelic that would make us, and if I may
say so, Mrs. Lucy, how unlike a human being! In my poor opinion you saw
too many things at a time, perhaps, and were too sure of what you saw.
Two young men are not so easy to understand as one young man, and not
nearly so necessary to a young woman’s happiness. Perhaps you feel
yourself more responsible than you need for all that happened, and
Philip I think shares this disability. ‘In the end,’ Nietzsche, who had
flashes of violent wisdom, remarks, ‘we experience only our true
selves,’ and he might well have added that we are responsible _only_ for
our true selves, but had this occurred to him he might never have gone
mad. You have found that the career of the Lord God is a difficult one,
Mrs. Lucy, and I am not without hope that Philip may also see he need
_not_ have been perfectly in the right about this ball. Perhaps he has
already discovered it—for it was his idea that I should call for you at
the hotel in case you had no one with whom you cared to drive back to
Everslade.”

“Philip’s idea!” Lucy gasped. “Then he was with you last night?”

“He was at my home with Myra and with me,” Mr. O’San placidly told her.
“It was, in fact, Myra’s plan. She rang me up from the school and
suggested that I should call for her after you had gone to the dance;
avoiding the higher ministrations of Miss Loring, we won the consent of
Miss Peck, so Myra spent the night at home. I sent her back to the
school, however, in my other car early this morning; and I hope she will
not have lowered the standard of her daily work by this permitted
adventure.”

Lucy’s one idea now was to say good-by to Mr. O’San as quickly as
possible and see Myra—Myra, she thought, would really be able to tell
her about Philip. Mr. O’San had been talking in a very wise way, if it
had been about anyone else but Philip. But wisdom when it is applied to
the man you love is like a blind person coming into a strange room, he
cannot know where or what the things are that he knocks up against. Myra
would not talk in the same wise manner as her father but she would have
seen Philip as Lucy herself would have seen him.




                           _CHAPTER XXXVIII_


Elvira swept upon Lucy from the open doorway and cut off all possible
retreat. Her eyes were full of exultant fury and Lucy saw that she was
in for an immediate battle.

For the last fortnight there had been a tacit war between them; but Lucy
had been determined to avoid an open conflict, and Elvira had been
unsure of her ground.

Now Elvira knew that she could afford to fight. All the discouragements,
all the burning rage of a capacity long held at bay by unfair
restrictions, rose up from their dark caverns to reinforce Elvira’s
resentment. Her eyes sparkled with released antagonism, her big untidy
nostrils flared their crimson signals, her whole body seemed swollen and
alert with rage.

“If you don’t mind, Lucy,” she said with bitter insolence, “before you
go to rest after dancing all night, or start some fresh form of
amusement for yourself, I’d like a professional talk with you.”

Lucy’s heart sank, her knees wobbled, but she retained enough outward
composure to say quietly, “Then you’d better come in here,” and opening
the door into her office, she sat down at her desk.

It was three o’clock in the afternoon. No breath of air stirred on the
mountainside, no sound broke its stillness. A letter lay prominently on
the desk in front of Lucy. Automatically she picked it up and held it
between her shaking fingers as if to steady them. The window was open
and the sun blinds drawn and yet the heat filling the neat, uncarpeted
room with its lifeless weight penetrated every nerve.

Elvira stood above Lucy, taut and tingling with power against her
exhausted enemy.

She drew a deep, satisfied breath before she spoke. “Two members of your
committee called here yesterday after you’d gone,” she began. “There had
been complaints about the way you were carrying on with Philip Calgary.
People wanted to know why Whiteleaf had left so suddenly. Everyone knows
now that she was a Communist. Probably you are one yourself, from the
way you behave, and anyway you must have known Whiteleaf was, yet you
never reported it. They wanted to know what you had been doing up here
all alone in the hurricane for three days and nights, having got rid of
all witnesses except a sick child. They had to investigate why you sent
a school of young children at the last moment to the mission, with such
a storm coming on. A most unnecessary risk while you were safe, as I
always thought, here at Everslade in comfort, doing who knows what
behind our backs.”

Lucy’s nerves steadied to meet the breathless onslaught. “What members
of the committee called?” she asked dryly. “I met most of them at the
dance and they seemed perfectly unaware of all these ridiculous
suspicions.”

Elvira’s temper mounted, her lips did not chatter with rage, but they
moved faster than her speech, as if she were thinking in some other
fiercer and more fluent language. Her scarlet nails plucked ominously at
her skirt.

“Suspicions,” she said, her voice thickening and coarsening, “can be
based on facts. Mr. Myers and Mrs. Umberton called to find out _what_
facts. They were not invited to your precious dance, nor would they have
gone whoever’d asked them. Dancing on graves was what they called it.
People who pretend to have sympathy with this island should at least
have stayed away!”

“I rather agree with you about the dance,” Lucy surprisingly admitted.
“I am sorry that I went. I think it was a mistake to have gone, but the
intention was not callous. We were trying to raise the largest sum of
money for hurricane victims in the shortest space of time, but I think
now that the choice of method was unsuitable. If Mr. Myers and Mrs.
Umberton think I was wrong to go to the dance, so do I.”

“Well!” gasped Elvira, torn between astonishment and fury that Lucy
should, by accepting the condemnation of her adversaries, remove part of
its weight. “That makes it all the worse—if you went to the dance
_knowing_ it was wrong. They thought it a most cruel and brutal
entertainment and that your going was bad for the whole school. But of
course it wasn’t the _worst_ thing they had against you. They were
perfectly fair. They’d come up expecting to see you. They insisted on
evidence about everything they had heard. They _had_ evidence. Margorie
Fielding saw you meeting Philip Calgary in the annex after dark. Now you
will have to leave.”

“Poor child,” Lucy said under her breath. Elvira’s arm jerked up, she
leaned forward with her hand raised to strike, but there was no
answering challenge in the eyes that met Elvira’s. Elvira was
confronting the most invulnerable of all human emotions, the
carelessness of a broken heart. It simply did not matter to Lucy whether
Elvira struck her or not. Elvira’s arm fell to her side, she moved a
step backward.

“Poor child!” she repeated sneeringly, “it’s not you who have the power
to make that girl suffer, or to protect her, either, if I choose to make
her suffer. I have always been able to make Margorie do what I like.”

“I have no such power,” Lucy agreed gently, “and it is true that I
cannot protect her from you, unless she wishes it.” There was a long
silence.

Elvira drew forward a chair and sat down. It had occurred to her
suddenly that standing over a beaten enemy who was not afraid of her was
a doubtful advantage. “You can’t get out of things now by owning up to
them,” she started with fresh malice. “It’s all very well to say you’re
sorry about the dance—and that you have no power. Headmistresses _must_
have power and _mustn’t_ do things they have to be sorry for. What your
committee want to know as well is whether you _knew_ Whiteleaf was a
Communist, and if so why you didn’t report it? Was it because you were
one yourself, and if so why did she go as if she were running away from
you?”

“I didn’t know Whiteleaf was a Communist,” Lucy said slowly, “and I _do_
think it dangerous to have children taught by Communists. But perhaps
not for the same reasons you do. It was particularly dangerous to the
children here, because Whiteleaf lived her creed and I don’t
think—except Nancy Peck, perhaps—that any of us were living ours. It
might make any child believe in communism to be taught by an unconvinced
Christian, as well as by a convinced Communist. Don’t you think so too?”

Elvira breathed fast. “You may be no Christian,” she said
contemptuously, “you certainly don’t act as if you were one, but it’s
most arrogant and uncharitable of you to bracket the rest of us with
yourself. How do you know what we are? We stick to our creed and our
country and don’t have black lovers on the sly—that’s surely something!
Besides, why, if you’re so keen on the way Whiteleaf behaved, did you
take Philip Calgary away from her? That doesn’t sound a particularly
Christian thing to do, does it?”

“I know what I believe now,” Lucy said as if she were speaking to
herself rather than to Elvira, “but I didn’t when I came here, that is
why things happened that I can’t defend. I thought I was both a democrat
and a Christian, but I found that I was neither. Whiteleaf was like a
touchstone to me, I knew from her—even from her going away at the
last—what I wasn’t. What she converted me to was the opposite from
communism—but she _did_ convert me. I now want to be _really_ what I
never was before—both a Christian and a democrat.”

Elvira stared at Lucy with exasperated incredulity. She hated her more
than ever but she couldn’t withhold an unwilling respect. Flushed with
the wounds they had inflicted on each other, neither could quite forget
that they had once been happy friends. Lucy disliked talking about her
emotions, nevertheless she felt that she owed it to Elvira to unmask
herself. Intimacy, once established, has a right to truth.

“Elvira,” Lucy said after a long pause, “I know you hate me now, and I
know you want to get rid of me, you don’t mind how, but after all, we
were friends once, and as it now looks as if you had succeeded in
getting rid of me, don’t you think you can give up trying?” Elvira began
to tremble with something that was not only anger. The one thing she was
unarmed against was the truth. Did Lucy know it, after all, and could
she prove what she knew? “This nonsense about the hurricane,” Lucy went
on with increasing confidence, “you might let that slide, I think.
Nothing anyone can do is safe in a hurricane. The school arrived at the
mission in time. The mission was on the sheltered side of the mountain.
Everslade wasn’t. Henriette and I had luck; and we were greatly helped
and supported by Myra and her father’s having come to join us. As for
Philip Calgary, he came up here only after the storm was over, and for
the same reason Bob Anstruther came, to find out what help we needed. It
is true we are in love with each other, and when Margorie saw us—it
must still have been daylight or she wouldn’t have seen us—we were glad
to find that we were both alive, and showed it, as lovers do. I am sure
that Margorie will not be injured by having seen us together when we
were happy. We were engaged to be married, but I do not think Philip
will marry me now, because I went to that ball.” Lucy gave a queer
little sigh, as if she found there was no more air that she cared to
breathe. “Even if the committee didn’t ask me to resign now,” she went
on, “I had come to the conclusion that I must leave this school. I have
been here ten months, and at the end of my first year our arrangement
was that I could go if I liked and that they could insist on my
resignation if they wanted to get rid of me. Well, I _will_ go! And now
would you mind leaving me alone?”

It was not how Elvira had wished or expected this triumphant interview
to end. She had indeed won from it more than she had expected to win.

It might not have been so easy to get rid of Lucy, if Lucy, with all her
social advantages, had chosen to fight it out.

In the excitement of her released rage, Elvira had gone much further
than she had had any right to go. Mr. Myers had strongly advised her to
hold her tongue, and promised that if she did so, he, with the help of
the Brigadier’s letter and Margorie’s evidence, would succeed in forcing
Lucy to resign. Now Lucy had got rid of herself, and Elvira found that
this was not nearly so satisfactory. Lucy sat there neither indignant,
alarmed, nor, apparently, crushed. She was still, in some peculiar and
underhand way, mistress of the situation.

What was it, Elvira asked herself, trapped by her own duplicity, that
kept Lucy so firmly balanced on an even keel? Did Lucy know about
Elvira’s efforts to get rid of her, and if she knew did she intend to
use her knowledge?

“What do you mean,” she forced herself to ask, “by trying to get rid of
you? You’ve got rid of yourself.”

“Certainly you might not have been able to dispose of me so easily if I
had not made mistakes,” Lucy agreed calmly, “but I didn’t try to murder
myself.”

Elvira sprang to her feet, shaking with fear as well as with anger.
“What nonsense are you talking—about murder?” she gasped.

“You know much better than I do what I am talking about,” Lucy answered
quietly, “you knew all the time. I couldn’t, till quite lately, believe
it. But I’m not going to act on what I know, Elvira—as far as I am
concerned you are perfectly safe.”

Elvira turned slowly toward the door, and shut it carefully behind her,
as if she were trying to escape from something that was still dangerous.




                            _CHAPTER XXXIX_


Lucy sat without stirring in the hot little room which still contained
so much fear and anger. Grief, which had receded while the battle raged,
seeped slowly back like an incoming tide into full possession of her
heart. There was nothing, she said to herself, now—nothing. Philip was
irreconcilably estranged; and her working life was ended.

She would, of course, work again in England with neat, friendly,
sport-built girls, good girls on the whole, with courage and very little
malice. But not one of them alive and alert like these dark, dynamic
children, not one turning to her with vigor and passion, for new life.
These dark children had complete confidence in Lucy. They trusted life
because Lucy had trusted them. She had been able to give them what they
needed most, and what only a white woman who herself had it _could_ give
them: an innate respect for human beings. They had felt united not only
to her but to other people through her. If Lucy, who was white and
recognized as the flower of her own people, could make each one of them
realize that they were of equal value, then all life was open to
them—all fear behind them. Each child in turn had passed through this
rebirth and Lucy had passed through it with her. Only Elvira’s bodyguard
of six spoiled, resentful, smoldering girls had stood aloof, wanting not
equality but special privileges, and their own way over lesser beings
than themselves. In Elvira they saw their prototype and had clung to her
accordingly. Without Lucy the younger children would not be real to
themselves any more, they would have to try to win toleration by
pretending to be like what they didn’t understand. Many of them would
retain their self-respect and survive any régime that followed. Myra’s
self-respect would survive, and perhaps a dozen others might follow her
example. Nancy Peck would do her best to help all of them, but she was
one of themselves. The children believed in Nancy with loyalty and
admiration, but a white teacher who respected them as Lucy had respected
them imparted a new magic. Through her they had found themselves at home
with life.

“I shall feel like an empty glove without them,” Lucy thought to
herself. “But now that I’ve lost the school, I can’t stay on the Island.
Philip’s friends without Philip wouldn’t want me, and I’ve lost my own.
There really isn’t anything but the next boat back; and when I get back
what is there? Only what I know there isn’t—or what I didn’t want
before and want less now.”

Her eyes wandered to the unopened letter she still held rigidly in her
hand. “I suppose I’ve got to read this,” Lucy told herself, “and then I
can get some food and sleep.”

    “Dear Mrs. Armstrong,” she read. “I am sorry if what I am going
    to do will be a bother to you. I’m afraid it may be, but I can’t
    help doing it. I just can’t stick it any more. It’s not only
    having lost you your job, it is other things as well. I found
    out what I thought I had was gone, and there isn’t anything
    left. Perhaps if I’d known you earlier things might have been
    different, but I seem always to have wanted the wrong things at
    a time when I could have them and the right things at a time
    when I couldn’t.

    “It’s all been rather a muddle. I shall be dead when you get
    this. It won’t matter awfully to father because he’s going to
    marry again, besides, he’ll understand after the way I’ve
    behaved, I can’t go on living.

    “If someone’s got to be dead because of cutting down the
    silk-cotton tree I think I’d rather it was me. I shall jump over
    the cliff at that queer place called the Judas Leap. They say
    someone jumped over there long ago because he’d betrayed his
    friend. I tell you this to save you the trouble of looking for
    me all over the Island. There’s a strong current round that
    point so no one will be likely to find my body before the sharks
    get it. Margorie.”

The room spun around her in a dark mist; then in a rush her trained
young strength came back to her. “People,” Lucy thought, “don’t always
commit suicide at once, and if they throw themselves over cliffs they
sometimes get stuck on a ledge or caught in bushes.”

She ran upstairs, changed into slacks, put on rope shoes, and rang for
Myra. “Look here,” she said without further greeting, “when did you last
see Margorie Fielding?”

“She was at breakfast,” Myra replied promptly. “But afterward she said
she had a headache and asked to be excused from lessons. Miss Loring
gave her an aspirin and let her go to her room. She didn’t come down
again.”

Lucy calculated. “Just look in her room for me, and see if she’s
there—if she’s not, see if she’s taken her bicycle. I’m rather in a
hurry to find her, but don’t tell anyone I’m looking for her till we
know for certain she’s gone.”

Myra disappeared, returning as if by magic. “She’s not in her room and
her bicycle is gone,” she said breathlessly.

Lucy’s eyes held hers. “I think you’d better ring up Philip and tell him
she has gone to the Judas Leap and that I have gone after her by car—I
hope to catch her up—but tell him I’m afraid of what she has gone there
for. If you can’t get on to Philip tell Nancy Peck to wait till dusk,
and then if she hasn’t heard from me, phone the nearest police station
to the Leap. Nobody else must know till we are certain what has
happened.” Lucy tried to smile into the narrow anxious eyes fixed upon
hers.

“You will go alone?” Myra asked tremulously. “Do not forget—even this
may be a trick.”

“Yes, I must go alone. Margorie won’t try to trick me any more,” Lucy
told her. “It’s herself she’s trying to trick now. I can just get there
by daylight. I’ve looked it up on the map.”

Lucy kissed Myra’s forehead and, pushing her gently to one side, ran to
her car.

She drove down the mountainside with blind audacity. Time and the girl
she drove to save were fixed in front of her like alternating traffic
signals. Each mile was a mortal enemy. The car rocked from side to side
while the long, curving zigzags shuffled themselves behind her. She was
out on the plain while the sun was still at its height. The red dust
rose around the little car like rusty patches of cloud. The spring
drought covered the land. It would kill every living thing before the
summer’s end. Starved white and yellow grasses poured past her. The wall
of dust opened and closed behind her, admitting for anxious fragments of
time a startled dark face, or a donkey hardly lifting its neat
hoofs—but there was no girl on a bicycle. A huge pond shook and
glistened before Lucy’s eyes; she knew then that the sea was close. The
road, rougher and less used by traffic now, began to climb. She reached
the cliffs, and by the side of the road the blue, stretched sea opened
and spread smooth as taffeta.

Lucy stopped the car near the cliff’s edge and stood dizzily blinking in
the hard light. The cliff she was on was covered with thick dry
brushwood. Spiteful branches of undergrowth whipped against her every
movement. The day’s heat filled the smoldering air with overpowering
fragrance. Everything she touched crumbled and fought against her.

There was a fence at the cliff’s edge, and Lucy found a girl’s bicycle
leaning against it. “No one could jump from here,” she said to herself
reassuringly, for though it was precipitous, it was not sheer. The cliff
was, Lucy thought, negotiable to a steady climber. This was the highest
point of the headland, but pushing her way slowly and watchfully through
the powdery undergrowth, she came on a cliff that was lower but far more
formidable. There were a few yards of bush-covered slope ending in a
precipice. Far below it the sea lipped the edges of sharp rocks. Lucy
crept cautiously across the friable earth and peered over the edge.
Something white fluttered on the rocks beneath.

“I’ll have to get down there somehow,” Lucy told herself.

Heat and exhaustion made her head swim and her heart pound, but the
acute long slope of the headland when she returned to it looked no worse
than when she had first calculated a climber’s chances.

The slope was long, and at points acute; but there were bushes and trees
for hand holds and the rocks had seams and occasional ledges. The
unchanging blue floor mocked her with its distance, but Lucy crept on
with long terrifying interludes, hanging above a rock face, or trusting
to crumbling earth surfaces. There was a final long and nasty drop
before she reached a heap of stones and found herself at the sea’s edge.
There she was confronted with the headland itself, and saw that she must
swim around it to reach the foot of the precipice. There was no use
bothering about sharks, so she tied her clothes in a bundle onto her
head and plunged into the clear, translucent sea. There was a strong
current against her, but once around the point Lucy found herself on a
stretch of golden sand. She called Margorie’s name again and again, but
only her own voice was tossed back at her from the walls of the
precipice. Slipping on her wet slacks and shirt, Lucy climbed the
nearest rock. From its top she could see that the little heap of clothes
was the body of a girl.

When Lucy reached it, she saw that Margorie was still alive. “I heard
you shout,” Margorie whispered, “but I couldn’t answer—my throat feels
funny. I can’t move. I didn’t know who it was shouting, but I’m glad
it’s you. I haven’t any pain.”

Lucy drew the girl’s head onto her lap, shielding her eyes from the
sun’s glare. Margorie’s eyes had a glazed look, like the eyes of a dog
Lucy had once seen run over. The swift, irregular thread of her pulse
raced and checked, tying itself into knots under Lucy’s fingers. There
was a long silence before the girl’s little dry whisper came again. “I
wanted to die,” Margorie murmured, “but after I jumped—I didn’t. I’d
like to live now—only I can’t.”

She closed her eyes as if Lucy were a hostess to whose perfunctory
farewells she need no longer listen. After a long silence she opened
them again and murmured, “My eyes are growing dim.” She spoke without
fear but as one who registers a necessary fact.

Lucy bent closer to her. “Live a little longer,” she pleaded. “Philip
Calgary is coming, he might help you!”

A look of amused recognition pierced through Margorie’s withdrawing
consciousness. “Oh, but you don’t know what I did to you,” she murmured.
“Why should he help me?”

“It doesn’t matter what you did,” Lucy said passionately. “It only
matters now that you should live. Besides, I don’t mind leaving the
school. Everything’s all right, really.”

The amusement in Margorie’s eyes flickered and went out. Her shallow,
rapid breathing slowed and altered—her eyes grew fixed, and with a
last, long wavering sigh, her life ended.

Lucy no longer heard the slap of the waves edge against the rocks. The
last golden light of the day froze over the little cove. The shadows of
the rocks were sharp-edged and looked as solid as the rocks themselves.

The Island and Lucy were bound together in a point of time, but they
were alien presences, unable to get away from each other or to
communicate anything.

A circle of small papery crabs, with round black eyes a pin’s length in
front of their furrowed, irregular foreheads, stared at Lucy, prepared
if she moved hand or foot to scuttle back into the nearest pool.
Enormous hollow clouds moved across the sky, their white immensity
touched with sunset gold. Lucy had not seen her lovers die. They had
passed out of her life as a dream ends, without a visible moment between
their full being and the mere impact of a spoken word forcing her to
believe that they were dead. Now she saw life itself withdrawn from its
living tenement, and felt that nothing else was alive, not even her own
heart.

A pelican sailed leisurely over Lucy’s head. He glanced straight at her
and the dead girl with a cold, dispassionate scrutiny. His ugly beak and
clumsy wings had an irresponsible, fortuitous look, like a surrealist
picture. Yet he was alive, and after he had passed out of her sight her
living lover forced himself into her mind again. How had she dared to
ask Myra to telephone to Philip, since there was no Philip? There was
only a formal and extremely busy surgeon, who had nothing at all to do
with Lucy or the school, and had told her so. Yet when Lucy read
Margorie’s letter, she knew that Philip was their one chance of rescue;
this certainty of Philip’s response had gone with Margorie’s last
breath.

Lucy was alone with the Island she had come to serve; and neither of
them had anything to give the other.

She tried to think about God, but God had expected her to do something
that she hadn’t done. He too had withdrawn and left her, crying beside a
dead girl whom she had not saved.




                              _CHAPTER XL_


Darkness crept slowly across the glittering sea. On the cliff’s edge a
wild light lingered as if it hated to let go the day. A breeze reached
the dead girl and blew her hair about her face. The color had not left
her lips and cheeks, but the hand Lucy still held was growing cold.

A stone crashed through the silence, and then another, and another.
Philip’s voice shouted, “Lucy! Lucy!” Grief rushed into Lucy’s heart, as
if she had been waiting for Philip before she dared to feel it.

The whole cove came alive again with his presence. The menacing crabs
leaped into the nearest ripple; the sea stretched less formidably toward
the darkening sky. The Island was no longer strange. Even the light held
itself back as if to wait till Philip, drenched by the sea, leaped over
the rocks to reach Lucy’s side. His eyes held hers for one brief moment
of release, before he knelt by the dead girl, intent upon her injuries.

“She’s gone,” he said at last, with defeat in his voice. “Her back is
splintered.”

“I didn’t get to her in time,” Lucy cried, with the tears pouring down
her face. “Oh, Philip—I might have saved her.”

“There are some things that can’t be saved,” Philip answered with somber
tenderness. “But it would have been much more dreadful if she hadn’t
died so soon. Was she still alive when you reached her?”

“Yes, she was just alive. She knew me—she wasn’t sorry I came—but it
needn’t have happened! If I hadn’t gone to that horrible dance, I might
have seen in time how desperate she was. I could have stopped her being
trapped into telling lies. And I kept thinking—it might be you who lay
here dead because I was so blind.”

“I take a lot of killing,” Philip told her grimly. “You must have sat,
by the look of you, letting your clothes dry on you. That isn’t a safe
thing to do on this Island. You must take a big dose of quinine directly
you get back. You won’t have to wait long now. The fishermen from White
Bay will bring their caïque round the coast as soon as they get their
catch in. I phoned the nearest constabulary to pick up our cars. They’ll
meet us at the bay and notify her father. Fortunately Myra got hold of
this child’s letter to you; you left it on the floor. It might have made
trouble if Elvira had found it.”

“Oh, no, Philip! Surely not now!” Lucy cried. “When everything’s all
over—when Margorie’s dead! Elvira wouldn’t!”

“Once you have made enemies on this island they remain enemies,” Philip
told her. “If Elvira could have twisted this into a murder charge, or at
least some criminal act of carelessness on your part, be very sure she
would. But she can’t now. I shall see to that. She will resign or be
dismissed. Such a teacher is worse than a typhoid carrier among
adolescent girls. Myra and her father—your queer little Miss Lestrange
too—will all give evidence against her to the Committee; and I shall
add my own. As for the poor child here—don’t take her death too
tragically. It wasn’t your fault. We know whose hand it was. Even if
you’d reached her in time to stop her, you’d only have checked _this_
impulse.

“Sooner or later she would have had another—perhaps a more disastrous
impulse. She was more damaged than you knew. I doubt if anything could
have pulled her out of this cat-and-mouse game of Elvira’s. She had to
lose more than she could survive. Did you never realize whose hand
pushed you over the balcony?”

“Not Margorie’s?” Lucy cried, in horror. Philip drew his skilled hands
over the dead girl’s body, straightening it and lifting her gently away
from Lucy. He clasped her hands across her breast and closed her blank,
unseeing eyes.

“She is dead now,” he said firmly. “You don’t have to let what’s over
and done with give you fresh pain. Miss Lestrange saw her come out of
your room after you fell. She didn’t, for some time afterward, mention
it—and then only as a sort of precautionary suggestion to Whiteleaf.
They decided not to act upon it, because Elvira had already acted for
them. She hadn’t anticipated her devotee’s attempt, and at that period
she didn’t want violence. She had made up her mind to become your
mainstay and bosom friend, acting through you rather than against you.
God knows what mental torture she didn’t inflict on this poor child for
nearly sabotaging her plan. Perhaps it would have been better if it had
all come out then, but Margorie might have taken it with the same kind
of violence she has used now. Whiteleaf hoped for a happier issue. She
thought this girl would take to you after a time and be helped by you
out of her difficulties.”

“I was never any good to her. Why should she take to me?” Lucy asked
sadly.

“Well, for one thing because you were so alike,” Philip answered with a
wry smile. “You were both the kind of girl who goes over precipices
rather than takes the long way round, girls who don’t know what’s at the
bottom of their own minds, or other people’s.”

“I suppose that’s fair,” Lucy said rather stiffly, “but it’s very
unkind. You might have guessed I went to that dance to meet them all
together, for the last time _as_ one of them, and then to be free of
them forever. It was there I told Bob I was going to marry you.”

Philip’s eyes fixed themselves on Lucy’s. “You _wanted_ to be free of
them?” he asked incredulously. “And Bob Anstruther, too—forever?”

“But of course. Don’t you remember you said I was to _think_—well, that
was what came of my thinking,” Lucy said reproachfully.

Silence deepened around them. Darkness rose from the sea and met the
cliffs above, hiding them from each other’s eyes. “You did your thinking
alone,” Philip said at last, “after we had—as I thought—come together.
That was why I lost you.”

“But not now,” Lucy cried. “I don’t feel lost any more. When this
happened I knew if I called to you you’d come. And you _have_ come,
Philip.”

“Yes. I’ve come,” he said slowly, in his deep, low voice. “I am prepared
now to be with you always, if you feel that you can accept the little I
have to offer. But we shall have to _really_ live together, Lucy, and
share all our thoughts. We shall be very much alone. We have a poet,
Basil McFarlan—one of ourselves on this island—who has written what we
are better than I can explain it. He calls it ‘The Final Man.’

                 “‘In this light that is no light.
                 This time that is no time, to be
                 And to be free;

                 This is the final man,
                 Who lives within the dusk.
                 Who is the dusk always.’

“Do you really want it, Lucy, to be with the dusk always?”

“Yes. I really want it,” Lucy whispered quickly. Beneath her grief she
felt the strength of Philip’s nearness—and yet she was glad that he had
not taken her into his arms.

The dead girl was between them, and the weight of her broken life still
rested on Lucy’s heart. “But it’s not only me,” she said into the
friendly darkness. “It’s you as well, Philip. Myra said something once
about my hands, as if she had to learn to like them because I was
white.”

Philip laughed softly, his hand closed over hers, warm with his life.
“That’s not one of my troubles. After all, I am a scientist, I am only
concerned with facts, not with men’s fancies and prejudices about
facts—theories in the air that come out of personal prestige or the
vagaries of power and money. A surgeon’s business is to mend bodies, he
has no other. Every human being is the same to me. Why should I trouble
myself what color the skin is when the blood beneath it is always life?
Still, I have a trouble about you, Lucy, which unfortunately we must
share. This Island is all I have to offer you as a home. It is a small,
beautiful, and dangerous island; and I can’t give you a home in any
other country. We might visit Canada or England, but even those
countries to which we belong by right often give us a sour welcome. You
will find many humiliating and awkward things happening to
you—unimaginable little things to which I am hardened. I have never
been ashamed to belong to my own people, but I do feel ashamed to have
to ask you to share disabilities that are beyond my control.”

“I want no other home than you,” Lucy said under her breath. Philip made
no direct answer, but he sighed a long, deep sigh, as if his whole being
was released into the region of her heart. Neither of them moved again
until out of the flat darkness of the sea a crimson light flowered like
a rose.

“Those are the torches from our boat,” Philip said. “I must go down and
meet the men.”

As the boat neared the shore the flares danced and flickered over the
cove and Lucy caught sudden glimpses of the men’s dark, anxious faces,
full of concern and wonder. Their tattered clothes hung loosely on their
emaciated bodies. They dragged their long caïque swiftly up the beach
and crowded around Philip talking eagerly to him. Lucy could not
understand what they said, but she could feel their pity and their
kindness.

Philip turned and came back to Lucy and the dead girl. He lifted
Margorie and carried her across the rocks into the boat, while the men
held it firmly so that it could not shake the motionless light form.
Lucy did not wait for Philip to help her, she took the men’s
outstretched hands as if they were her brothers.

The caïque slipped without a sound from the still cove into the open
darkness of the sea. Above them the stars shone, remote and golden.
Their brilliant worlds did nothing to change the black floor of the sea,
or lighten the darkness of the night. The men’s oars invisibly rising
and falling feathered the sea with fountains of bright foam, and as the
boat sprang forward to meet the quickening of the waves, the fishermen
sang to hearten themselves and their bereaved companions. Their voices
were not beautiful or strong, but they had a natural penetrating
sweetness. They sang for this lost white child as people sing who have
themselves lost children.




                           TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple
spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors
occur.

            [The end of _Under the Skin_ by Phyllis Bottome]