It did not take them many minutes at this gait to get clear of the town. A road between half-built houses led down to the shore, and he turned the car down it; in a few moments they had bumped over the loose sand of the dunes and come to a standstill beside the line of seaweed that showed highwater mark, the wide and treacherous flats of the bay stretching before them almost to the horizon.
He stopped the engine, and there was dead silence except for the crying of gulls. He stared out over the flats at the distant sea with unseeing eyes. Ursula Brangwyn, the breath knocked out of her, stared at him. What had provoked this storm that had suddenly come out of the blue? What hidden forces had been unleashed by her unthinking words - Why are you doing all this? Why was he doing it? Her question had certainly touched him on the raw, and his answer had been the answer of outraged pride.
He turned slowly round. ‘I wish to apologize,’ he said. ‘I am afraid I let you in for a good deal of unpleasantness. I am exceedingly sorry. I hope you'll forget it if you can. I don't know what possessed me to speak as I did. I didn't mean to.’
‘There is nothing in that,’ said Ursula quietly. ‘I have thought no more about it. We both spoke hastily and said a lot more than we meant. But I wish I knew what it was all about. It blew up so suddenly, all out of nothing.’
‘I don't know what it was about any more than you do,’ said Murchison moodily, resting his elbows on the steering-wheel and his chin in his hand, and staring out over the desolate flats to the far-off sea. ‘I suddenly got mad with you. I don't know why. I felt I was in a very false position with you, and I resented it, as I suppose any man would who isn't a pot-hunter.’
‘It is a very queer position for both of us,’ said Ursula.
‘Very,’ said Murchison, continuing to stare at the distant fine of breakers.
‘Can you see the end of it?’ asked the girl tentatively.
‘No, frankly, I can't. But I can see a most awful bust-up on the way. I think we're playing with fire, if you ask me.’
‘In what way?’
‘Need we be crude? You weren't born yesterday. You know the way of the world, I take it. You are a very attractive woman, and I am a very lonely man. You aren't my style, and I'm not yours, and no good could come of it. And, anyway, I have no money.’
‘Need that worry us?’ said Ursula in a low voice.
‘It has begun to worry me,’ said Murchison. ‘I thought I could do what you needed in cold blood, but I find I can't. I'd be only too glad to lend you a hand, both for your own sake and your brother's, but I can't rely on myself, and you can't rely on me. I gave you a sample of my temper just now, so you see what it's like; and there's more of that where it came from, good and plenty, believe me.’
‘I-I think it will be all right,’ said the girl in a low voice.
‘I don't, and perhaps I know more about it than you do.’
‘Mr. Murchison, don't worry about it. It will be all right. I know what I am saying.’
He turned and looked at her sulkily.
‘I think you are talking through your hat,’ he said.
‘No, I am not. I know what I am talking about. It is the result of that ritual we worked together, the dance of the earth in spring.’
‘I have been let in for this thing in the dark,’ said Murchison angrily.
‘So have I!’ So have I!’ cried the girl. ‘My brother has forced both our hands. But, all the same, I think it will be all right. I can see that now.’
‘Well, I can't,’ said Murchison, ‘and I think I had better drive you back.’ He pressed the self-starter. Ursula bent forward and switched off the ignition.
‘No, we have got to finish this now we have started.’ She laid her hand on his arm, and he frowned and drew away angrily at the touch.
‘Do you know that we have gone too far in this thing to back out?’
‘I don't know anything about it. I have been let in for this without my knowledge or consent.’
‘Yes, I know you have, and so have I. My brother has been quite unscrupulous. But, all the same, it will be all right. I can feel that now.’
‘It depends on what you call all right. Your standards mayn't be the same as mine.’
Ursula took a firm hold on herself. ‘I should call this all right - if we were able to work the rite of the winged bull together, with all that it means.’
‘It means a very curious spiritual bond between a man and a woman. It means much more than ordinary marriage ever could.’
‘It means a very invidious position for the man, Miss Brangwyn, if he is placed as I am.’
‘In what way?’
‘Well, surely you know how I am placed? You don't need telling that twice, do you?’
‘I know nothing of your affairs, Mr. Murchison, except that your father was in the army, and you would have been, too, if the war had not put an end to his career.’
‘Then I had better tell you something about my affairs, Miss Brangwyn, and then perhaps you will understand the situation a little better than you do now.
‘I went into the army straight from school; my father was killed within a week of my joining up. I came out of the army at nineteen with a subloot's gratuity, which my brother took for board and lodging, instead of starting me off in a career with it, and I have never had a career of any sort, shape or description. I've never even driven a car before. I drove a van. That was how I learnt to drive. So far as I can see, I never shall have a career now. I shall be lucky if I end up with a sandwich board. I have been out of work a great deal oftener than in it, and that demoralizes a man. The only way I could make anything is in crime, and that is what I shall probably take to. I have a friend who is a motor-bandit. When I leave your brother I shall look him up.
‘That's my past, Miss Brangwyn, and my prospects, so perhaps you can see now why I hesitate to commit myself in any way.’
‘My brother thinks that you have very exceptional capacities, Mr. Murchison, and I know you could have a very good career with him if you were willing.’
‘Yes, but am I willing?’
‘Well, aren't you?’
‘God knows. I'd be a fool not to, placed as I am. Yes, I suppose I am. I don't know what possesses me to play up like this. I suppose it's the dying kick of my self-respect.’
‘What do you mean? Surely we are not asking anything of you that can hurt your self-respect?’
‘Depends on your standards, dear lady. I don't suppose there ought to be anything on God's earth that could hurt my self-respect.’
‘It seems to me that you have got a very bad inferiority complex and are being very silly,’ said Miss Brangwyn.
‘Yes, I expect you're right. Shall we go home?’
‘I think we had better. I wouldn't ask you to drive me if there were any other mode of conveyance.’
‘There is.’
‘What is that?’
‘You can hire a car at Llandudno junction, and we are quite near there. Or, if you can drive yourself, I will drop off there, and you can take the car back to the farm and I will take the train to London.’
‘Very good, drive me to Llandudno junction.’
He started up the car without a word, and they bumped laboriously back on to the main road, or so he thought.
But they had not been driving very long when the road came to a dead end at an abandoned coastguard station, and they found themselves with an arm of the sea barring further progress.
‘Damn it all!’ said Murchison savagely, ‘where are we?’
‘I'm afraid I don't know,’ said Ursula miserably. ‘I believe the main road turns inland somewhere about where we left it. We must be on the wrong road. We shall have to go back the way we came.’
He swung the car round impatiently; but he was used to a short-chassised van, and miscalculated the steerage-way required by a thoroughbred, and before he knew what was happening the front wheels were in the ditch and he had as much hope of shifting the car as he had of moving mountains.
‘My God!’ was all he could find to say. Ursula burst out laughing and slipped her hand through his arm.
‘It's no use,’ she said. ‘The stars in their courses won't let us part. We have got to be friends.’
‘Oh, my God!’ said Murchison, looking at her as she sat half turned towards him with her lips parted in laughter.
‘Shake hands?’ said Ursula. ‘You've been a beast to me, and I've been a cat to you. Shall we call it square?’
‘Right you are,’ said he, struggling to get himself in hand, and giving her a brief handshake. ‘Now what are we going to do? Is it far from here to the nearest village where we can ‘phone?’
‘A good way, I should think, when you come to walk it. We have been travelling down this road for quite ten minutes, and one covers a good deal of ground in that time in a car.’
‘Do you think you can manage to walk back, or will you wait here while I go and phone a garage?’
‘I couldn't possibly walk it. I've only got patent leather pumps on my feet.’
‘Well, then, you'll have to wait here, and I'll be as quick as I can.’
‘Very good.’
‘If you'll get out, I'll lift the seat out and put it inside this barn, you will be much more comfortable in there than in the car at this angle.’
They got out of the heeled-over car, and he did as he had suggested, making Ursula as comfortable as possible with rugs and her mink coat, and a packet of papers. Then he set off on his walk.
He was thankful to be alone. As always, Ursula Brangwyn went to his head at close quarters. He had used the right word when he had told her brother that he found her glamorous. She was like Lilith beguiling Adam. He remembered that Astley, who, God knows, wasn't particular, had called her Morgan le Fay, the witch-sister of Arthur, to whom Merlin had taught all enchantments. He had been reading about her in the books Brangwyn had put in his room, and had been struck at the time by her likeness to the pictures of the Keltic enchantress.
He had never believed it possible to dislike any woman quite so much. He hated her because he had been rude to her; because she was rich and sophisticated, and he was rough, uncouth and driftwood in life's stream, unless he were prepared to be a pensioner of her brother's, who was quite willing to stall-feed him handsomely provided he would marry her. But, above all, he hated her because she attracted him so tremendously, and the only terms on which he could have her were terms which his pride would not allow. Murchison, striding down the sandy road in the worst of tempers and the oldest of mackintoshes, felt he had every justification for hating the unhappy Ursula Brangwyn in her mink coat.
He had hardly gone a mile, however, when he saw on the other side of the creek that flanked the road at that point a youth fishing for eels. He hailed him, explained the situation, and bid the youth take himself off at top speed to the main road, which was at no great distance as the crow flies, hail a passing car, and send a message to the nearest garage. Then he set out to return to the derelict coastguard station, hoping against hope that none of his messages would miscarry. It had been impossible to give the youth a note to deliver because of the width of the creek.
His walk had cooled him considerably, but it had not been long enough to lessen his smouldering sense of resentment against life in general, and Ursula Brangwyn in particular. In fact, it seemed as if every wrong life had ever done him - the career that had never got started, the home that could never be his, all the thwartings of his natural instincts, all the hammering of the square peg into the round hole to which he had been subjected for the best years of his life - everything seemed to gather up and focus on to Ursula Brangwyn, who fascinated him, but whom he did not like, and whom he could never hope to meet on an equality.
He asked himself, as he walked back at a more leisurely pace over the sandy road, whether he would have asked her to marry him if he had been in a position to do so, and decided that he probably would, so great was the fascination she had for him, but it would certainly have turned out very badly. What could you expect if a girl married one man in order to get away from another, for whom she really cared? And, anyway, apart from her mink coat, she was pretty worthless. No girl who was any good would ever have got mixed up with a chap like Fouldes. This seemed incontestable to him, and deprived Ursula Brangwyn of any vestige of claim to his consideration that she might ever have possessed.
Then there came to him, in his evil mood, a bright idea. She had robbed him of every vestige of self-respect, and he did not suppose she herself could be blessed with an overplus of that commodity, judging by the way she had behaved with Fouldes. Why not make the best of both worlds and exploit her as she deserved to be exploited? It was true that his father's son would not have tolerated that idea, but the unemployed man who had drifted rudderless all these years took it in and welcomed it. He knew that Ursula Brangwyn had got to have him, and had now definitely made up her mind to take him. He could see that she was getting quite keen on the scheme her brother had propounded, for some reason best known to herself. The fact that the scheme was no longer distasteful to her gave him a sense of power over her; it made her a suppliant for his favours, instead of a reluctant yielder to her brother's pressure. And with the discovery of Ursula's changed attitude there came to Murchison a desire to repay on her all the humiliation he had received from life; he wished that Ursula Brangwyn in her mink coat should know humiliation as he had known it, because she had been willing to marry him without wanting him in order to get herself out of a scrape; because, although she was fascinating to him, he was a nauseous drought to her, only to be got down under the compulsion of dire necessity.
He would damn well rub her nose in it. It should be fifty-fifty as far as humiliation went, and life should pay up something on account towards the arrears it owed him.
Ursula Brangwyn, left alone in the open-fronted shed looking out to sea, came to the end of her own delicate Turkish cigarettes and started on one of Murchison's papers, made a wry face, and extinguished it. Then, being very bored and rather worried, lit it up again. It was better than nothing, and after she had smoked a few whiffs she found it better than she had expected. It was largely the contrast with the previous Turkish that had made it taste so foul.
And, as she did so, she thought of the man in whose pocket these cigarettes had been. She was doing exactly the same thing with him as she had done with his cigarette - first rejecting him as distasteful; then accepting him under the compulsion of necessity; and then finding him not so bad after all. As she inhaled deep lungfuls of the strong Virginia, she came to the conclusion that Murchison's type of cigarettes were considerably more satisfying than her scented Turkish when one was really in need of consolation. And the same applied to Murchison.
He was the most extraordinarily satisfying person when he took you in hand. Life had been lived at a high level during those few seconds when he caught hold of her and literally flung her out of the cafe and into the car. And the one thing above all others that she felt was that she could trust him; that he was absolutely reliable. And she knew that her brother felt the same about him, and she had great confidence in her brother. She felt rather ashamed of herself that she had not been able to see the possibilities in Murchison when she first met him, but had had to wait for a well-cut suit to reveal them to her. She was not taking his present difficile attitude too seriously. She was twenty-seven, and had seen something of life under her brother's roof, and she guessed that hurt pride was at the bottom of Murchison's trouble. His words, ‘You are a very attractive woman,’ had been balm of Gilead to her sore soul. She had been under the impression that he was lending himself to her brother's schemes for no other reason than a financial one; or, at best, out of pity. There had been times when he had been extraordinarily kind. She suspected that he was more attracted by her than he was willing to admit, even to himself; and because he felt himself to be in an invidious position with regard to her, he was ruffling up his feathers in this alarming manner. But for all his mutterings and threatenings her feminine ear caught another note now and again in his voice.
She was turning all this over in her mind, when suddenly, dark against the light, a man stood in front of her, having approached noiselessly over the loose sand. She could not see his face, and because he was tall she jumped to the conclusion that he must be Fouldes, and, screaming aloud, scrambled to her feet, standing at bay in the corner of the barn, her face livid with terror.
‘Good Lord, what's the matter?’ exclaimed the man, coming into the barn, and she saw that it was Murchison.
‘I thought it was Frank,’ she said, feeling weak and shaken and very foolish, for she saw at once that Murchison was not moved to sympathy on this occasion by her display of weakness.
She dropped down on the cushioned car-seat again, and drew the rug over her lap.
‘No,’ said the man, ‘I'm afraid I'm not Frank. Sorry, but it can't be helped.’
She was not sure whether he was making one of his rough jokes, or whether he was being nasty.
He, too, dropped down on the sand.
‘May I have one of my fags.’ he said. She passed him the crumpled packet, and then gave him a light from her little gold lighter. His eye caught the hall-mark as she held it towards him, and he did not love her any better.
‘I have been thinking things out,’ he said, between puffs at the newly lit cigarette. ‘And I have got a proposition to put before you.’
‘Yes?’ said Ursula tentatively, wondering what in the world was coming.
‘If I have got the hang of the job right, your brother wants me to marry you in order to cut out Fouldes, on the principle that one nail drives out another. Is that so?’
‘Yes,’ said Ursula faintly. ‘But there is more to it than that.’
He ignored the latter part of her remark and went on.
‘I told him that I would do anything I could for you, but I definitely would not marry you. Did he tell you that?’
‘No,’ said Ursula, still more faintly.
‘He seems to think, however, that the proposition is not a practicable one without marriage. Is that so?’
‘I don't know,’ said Ursula miserably.
‘Well, he seemed to think so. Now the proposition I have to put up is this. I am not willing to marry you for keeps, because I honestly don't think it would work. But I will marry you and live with you for a year if you like, provided the arrangement is subject to three months’ notice on either side. I mean by that, that if I provide the evidence any time after the year is up you will undertake to divorce me within three months, and I, on my side, will undertake to provide you with evidence any time you want it. I will do this on condition that you or your brother, it doesn't matter to me which, will put me through a university course in civil engineering, and give me a start overseas.’
He looked at Ursula, and saw that she had gone as white as a sheet, and a pang of compunction shot through him. But her next words removed it.
‘I suppose that is a reasonable proposition,’ she said, ‘I know my brother intended to make some sort of financial arrangement with you.’ Her head was held very high, but he saw that her mouth was quivering.
‘We'll take that as settled, shall we?’ he said, and rose to his feet. He wanted to get away from her; having shot his bolt, the sight of her was unbearable to him.
She rose, too, and they stood facing each other. He would not have believed that it was possible for him to desire to hurt and humiliate any living being as he desired to hurt and humiliate her as she stood there, looking white and frightened, in her mink coat, with her gold net purse lying at her feet, where she had dropped it in her agitation, spilling out its valuable contents on to the sand.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘as we are now formally engaged, I think that “a kiss or two is justly due, as, from, and between us both.”’ and he took her in his arms.
The moment he felt the touch of her soft lips on his, his evil enchantment left him. He held her from him at arm's length, and stared in horror at her white face.
‘My God!’ he said, ‘what have I been doing?’ and he turned on his heel and walked hastily out of the barn, to come face to face with the breakdown gang that had arrived unheard over the sandy road.
It did not take the powerful derrick long to get Brangwyn's car out of the ditch; but when they did so, they found that the steering-gear had been wrenched and the car was practically uncontrollable.
‘We'll pull her on the tow-rope to steady her,’ said the foreman of the gang, ‘and you must keep on straightening her out as she bears to one side. I think the lady had better come on the van with us in case you run into the ditch again.’
So on the journey back to civilisation Murchison had the company of a chatty youth in greasy overalls, and there was no opportunity to say any word of explanation or apology to Ursula.
At Llandudno junction, to which the breakdown van towed them, they went into a little hotel to have tea while the car retired in disgrace to the garage.
‘Is there any way of letting your brother know what has happened to us?’ said Murchison. ‘We shall be pretty late getting in.’
‘You can get at the farm quite easily,’ said Ursula. ‘Phone the hotel at the top of the pass, and they will send a boy up to the farm with a message.’
Murchison turned into the office to do his phoning, and when he came out the Boots informed him that the lady had taken a bedroom and gone to lie down, as she did not feel well.
Murchison ordered tea for one sulkily. He could hardly blame Ursula for not desiring his company after the way he had behaved towards her.