This story begins on a sea that was a blue dream, as colourful as blue silk stockings, and beneath a sky as blue as the irises of children’s eyes. From the western half of the sky the sun was shying little golden discs at the sea – if you gazed intently enough you could see them skip from wave tip to wave tip until they joined a broad collar of golden coin that was collecting half a mile out and would eventually be a dazzling sunset.
About halfway between the shore and the golden collar a white steam yacht, very young and graceful, was riding at anchor, and under a blue and white awning aft a yellow-haired girl reclined in a wicker settee reading The Revolt of the Angels by Anatole France. She was about eighteen, slender and supple, with a spoiled alluring mouth and quick grey eyes full of a radiant curiosity.
Suddenly the drowsy silence which enveloped the yacht was broken by the sound of heavy footsteps, and an elderly man, topped with orderly grey hair and clad in a white flannel suit, appeared at the head of the companionway. There he paused for a moment until his eyes became accustomed to the sun, and then, seeing the girl under the awning, he uttered a long even grunt of disapproval.
If he had intended thereby to obtain a rise of any sort he was doomed to disappointment. The girl calmly turned over two pages, turned back one, then very faintly but quite unmistakably yawned.
‘Ardita!’ said the grey-haired man sternly.
Ardita uttered a small sound indicating nothing.
‘Ardita!’ he repeated.
‘What?’
‘Will you listen to me – or shall I get a servant to hold you while I talk to you?’
‘Oh, can’t you leave me alone for a second?’
‘Ardita, I have just received a telephone message from the shore –’
‘Telephone?’ She showed for the first time a faint interest.
‘Yes. Colonel Moreland has called up again to ask me to be sure to bring you in to dinner. His son Toby has come all this way to meet you and he’s invited several other young people. For the last time, will you –’
‘No,’ said Ardita shortly. ‘I won’t. I came along on this cruise with the one idea of going to Palm Beach, and you knew it, and I absolutely refuse to meet any old colonel or any young Toby or any old young people or to set foot in any other old town in this country. So you either take me to Palm Beach or else go away.’
‘Very well. In your infatuation for this man – a man who is notorious for his excesses, a man your father would not have allowed to so much as mention your name – you have reflected the demi-monde rather than the circles in which you have presumably grown up. From now on –’
‘I know,’ interrupted Ardita ironically, ‘from now on you go your way and I go mine. I’ve heard that story before. You know I’d like nothing better.’
‘From now on,’ he announced grandiloquently, ‘you are no niece of mine. I –’
‘O-o-o-oh!’ The cry was wrung from Ardita with the agony of a lost soul.
‘Will you stop boring me? Will you go ’way? Will you jump overboard and drown? Do you want me to throw this book at you?’
‘If you dare do any –’
Smack! The Revolt of the Angels sailed through the air, missed its target by the length of a short nose and bumped cheerfully down the companionway.
The grey-haired man made an instinctive step backward and then two cautious steps forward. Ardita jumped to her five feet four and stared at him defiantly, her grey eyes blazing.
‘Keep off!’
‘How dare you?’ he cried.
‘Because I please!’
‘You’ve grown unbearable! Your disposition –’
‘You’ve made me like it! No child ever has a bad disposition unless it’s her family’s fault! Whatever I am, you did it.’
Muttering something under his breath, her uncle turned and, walking forward, called in a loud voice for the launch. Then he returned to the awning, where Ardita had again seated herself and resumed her attention to the Revolt of the Angels.
‘I am going ashore,’ he said slowly. ‘I will be out again at nine o’clock tonight. When I return we will start for home, where I shall turn you over to your aunt for the rest of your natural, or rather unnatural, life.’
He paused and looked at her, and then all at once something in the utter childishness of her beauty seemed to puncture his anger like an inflated tyre, and render him helpless, uncertain, utterly fatuous.
‘Ardita,’ he said not unkindly, ‘I’m no fool. I’ve been about. I know men. And, child, confirmed libertines don’t reform until they’re tired – and then they’re not themselves – they’re husks of themselves.’ He looked at her as if expecting agreement, but receiving no sight or sound of it, he continued. ‘Perhaps the man loves you – that’s possible. He’s loved many women and he’ll love many more. Less than a month ago, one month, Ardita, he was involved in a notorious affair with that red-haired woman, Mimi Merril. Why on earth do you want to marry him?’
‘I’m sure I couldn’t say,’ said Ardita shortly. ‘Maybe because he’s the only man I know, good or bad, who has an imagination and the courage of his convictions. Maybe it’s to get away from the young fools that spend their vacuous hours pursuing me around the country.’
‘How about the – red-haired woman?’
‘He hasn’t seen her for six months,’ she said angrily. ‘Don’t you suppose I have enough pride to see to that?’
Too full of words to speak, Mr Farnam cast one utterly condemning glance at his niece and, turning, went quickly down the ladder.
Five o’clock rolled down from the sun and plumped soundlessly into the sea. The golden collar widened into a glittering island; and a faint breeze that had been playing with the edges of the awning became suddenly freighted with song. Ardita lifted her head and listened.
With an exclamation she tossed her book to the deck, where it sprawled at a straddle, and hurried to the rail. Fifty feet away a large rowboat was approaching containing seven men, six of them rowing and one standing up in the stern keeping time to their song with an orchestra leader’s baton.
The leader’s eyes suddenly rested on Ardita, who was leaning over the rail spellbound with curiosity. He made a quick movement with his baton and the singing instantly ceased.
‘Narcissus ahoy!’ he called politely.
‘What’s the idea of all the discord?’ demanded Ardita cheerfully.
By this time the boat was scraping the side of the yacht and a boatman turned round and grasped the ladder. Thereupon the leader left his position in the stern and before Ardita had realized his intention he ran up the ladder and stood breathless before her on the deck.
‘The women and children will be spared!’ he said briskly. ‘All crying babies will be immediately drowned and all males put in irons!’
Digging her hands excitedly down into the pockets of her dress, Ardita stared at him, speechless with astonishment.
He was a young man with a scornful mouth and the bright blue eyes of a healthy baby set in a dark sensitive face. His hair was pitch black, damp and curly – the hair of a Grecian statue gone brunette. He was trimly built, trimly dressed and graceful as an agile quarterback.
‘Well, I never!’ she said dazedly.
They eyed each other coolly.
‘Is this an outburst of wit?’ demanded Ardita. ‘Are you an idiot – or just being initiated to some fraternity?’
‘I asked you if you surrendered the ship.’
‘You’d better get off this yacht!’ said Ardita.
‘What?’ The young man’s voice expressed incredulity.
‘Get off the yacht! Do you hear me?’
He looked at her for a moment as if considering what she had said.
‘No,’ said his scornful mouth slowly; ‘no, I won’t get off the yacht. You can get off if you wish.’
Going to the rail he gave a curt command and immediately the crew of the rowboat scrambled up the ladder and ranged themselves in line before him. Over the shoulder of each was slung a small, heavy-looking white sack, and under their arms they carried large black cases apparently containing musical instruments.
‘Ten-shun!’ commanded the young man, snapping his own heels together crisply. ‘Right driss! Front! Come here, Babe!’
The smallest man took a quick step forward and saluted.
‘Take command, go down below, catch the crew and tie ’em up – all except the engineer. Bring him up to me. Oh, and pile those bags by the rail there.’
‘Yes, sir!’
He saluted again, and wheeling about, motioned for the five others to gather about him. Then after a short whispered consultation they all filed noiselessly down the companion-way.
‘Now,’ said the young man cheerfully to Ardita, who had witnessed this last scene in withering silence, ‘if you will swear on your honour as a flapper – which probably isn’t worth much – that you’ll keep that spoiled little mouth of yours tight shut for forty-eight hours, you can row yourself ashore in our rowboat.’
‘Otherwise what?’
‘Otherwise you’re going to sea in a ship.’
With a little sigh as for a crisis well passed the young man sank into the settee Ardita had lately vacated, and stretched his arms lazily. The corners of his mouth relaxed appreciatively as he looked round at the rich striped awning, the polished brass and the luxurious fittings of the deck.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked presently.
‘Farnam.’
‘Farnam what?’
‘Ardita Farnam.’
‘Well, Ardita, no use standing up there and chewing out the insides of your mouth. You ought to break those nervous habits while you’re young. Come over here and sit down.’
Ardita took a carved jade case from her pocket, extracted a cigarette and lit it with a conscious coolness, though she knew her hand was trembling a little; then she crossed over with her supple, swinging walk, and sitting down in the other settee, blew a mouthful of smoke at the awning.
‘You can’t get me off this yacht,’ she said steadily; ‘and you haven’t got very much sense if you think you’ll get far with it. My uncle’ll have wirelesses zigzagging all over this ocean by half-past six.’
He laughed scornfully.
‘If that’s advice, you needn’t bother. This is part of a plan arranged before I ever knew this yacht existed. If it hadn’t been this one it’d have been the next one we passed anchored along the coast.’
‘Who are you?’ demanded Ardita suddenly. ‘And what are you?’
‘You’ve decided not to go ashore?’
‘I never even faintly considered it.’
‘We’re generally known,’ he said, ‘all seven of us, as Curtis Carlyle and his Six Sailormen, late of the Winter Garden and the Midnight Frolic.’
‘You’re singers?’
‘We were until today. At present, due to those white bags you see there, we’re fugitives from justice.’
‘What’s in the bags?’ asked Ardita curiously.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘for the present we’ll call it – mud.’
Within ten minutes after Curtis Carlyle’s interview with a very frightened engineer the yacht Narcissus was under way, steaming south through a balmy tropical twilight.
Having given orders for a meal to be prepared and served on deck at seven-thirty, Carlyle rejoined Ardita, and sinking back into his settee, half closed his eyes and fell into a state of profound abstraction.
Ardita scrutinized him carefully – and classed him immediately as a romantic figure. He gave the effect of towering self-confidence erected on a slight foundation – just under the surface of each of his decisions she discerned a hesitancy that was in decided contrast to the arrogant curl of his lips.
‘He’s not like me,’ she thought. ‘There’s a difference somewhere.’
Being a supreme egotist, Ardita frequently thought about herself; never having had her egotism disputed, she did it entirely naturally and with no distraction from her unquestioned charm. Though she was nineteen, she gave the effect of a high-spirited precocious child, and in the present glow of her youth and beauty all the men and women she had known were but driftwood on the ripples of her temperament. She had met other egotists – in fact, she found that selfish people bored her rather less than unselfish people – but as yet there had not been one she had not eventually defeated and brought to her feet.
But though she recognized an egotist in the settee next to her, she felt none of that usual shutting of doors in her mind which meant clearing ship for action; on the contrary, her instinct told her that this man was somehow completely pregnable and quite defenceless. When Ardita defied convention – and of late it had been her chief amusement – it was from an intense desire to be herself, and she felt that this man on the contrary was preoccupied with his own defiance.
The night deepened. A pale new moon rose slowly out of the sea, and as the shore faded dimly out and dark clouds were blown like leaves along the far horizon, a great haze of moonshine suddenly bathed the yacht and spread an avenue of glittering mail in her swift path. From time to time there was the bright flare of a match as one of them lighted a cigarette, but except for the low undertone of the throbbing engines and the even wash of the waves about the stern, the yacht was quiet as a dream boat star-bound through the heavens. Round them flowed the smell of the night sea, bringing with it an infinite languor.
Carlyle broke the silence at last.
‘Lucky girl,’ he sighed, ‘I’ve always wanted to be rich – and buy all this beauty.’
Ardita yawned.
‘I’d rather be you,’ she said frankly.
‘You would – for about a day. But you do seem to possess a lot of nerve for a flapper.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t call me that.’
‘Beg your pardon.’
‘As to nerve,’ she continued slowly, ‘it’s my one redeeming feature. I’m not afraid of anything in heaven or earth.’
‘H’m, I am.’
‘To be afraid,’ said Ardita, ‘a person has either to be very great and strong – or else a coward. I’m neither.’ She paused for a moment, and eagerness crept into her tone. ‘But I want to talk about you. What on earth have you done – and how did you do it?’
‘Why?’ he demanded cynically. ‘Going to write a story about me?’
‘Go on,’ she urged. ‘Lie to me by the moonlight. Tell a fabulous story.’
A sailor appeared, switched on a string of small lights under the awning and began setting the wicker table for supper. And while they ate cold sliced chicken, salad, artichokes and strawberry jam from the plentiful larder below, Carlyle began to talk, hesitatingly at first, but eagerly as he saw she was interested. Ardita scarcely touched her food as she watched his dark young face – handsome, ironic, faintly in effectual.
He began life as a poor kid, he said. Before he was thirteen he was picking up a living coaxing ragtime out of a battered violin in little cafés. Eight years later the ragtime craze hit the country and he took six darkies on the Orpheum circuit. They were making money – each contract he signed called for more – but, getting tired of troupe work, he went to managers and told them that he wanted to go on as a regular pianist. They laughed at him and told him he was crazy – it would be an artistic suicide. He used to laugh afterward at the phrase ‘artistic suicide.’ They all used it.
Then he began speculating wildly, and within three weeks he had lost every farthing he had saved.
Presently, in the recital of his adventures, he put a question to the girl.
There was no answer. He looked. She had fallen asleep.
In the dense sun-flooded noon of next day a spot in the sea before them resolved casually into a green-and-grey islet, apparently composed of a great granite cliff at its northern end which slanted south through a mile of vivid coppice and grass to a sandy beach melting lazily into the surf. When Ardita, reading in her favourite seat, came to the last page of The Revolt of the Angels and slamming the book shut, looked up and saw it, she gave a little cry of delight and called to Carlyle, who was standing moodily by the rail.
‘Is this it? Is this where you’re going?’
Carlyle shrugged his shoulders carelessly.
‘I don’t know.’ He raised his voice and called up to the acting skipper. ‘Babe, is this your island?’
The mulatto’s miniature head appeared from round the corner of the deckhouse.
‘Yes, sir! This is it.’
Carlyle joined Ardita.
‘Looks sort of sporting, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ she agreed; ‘but it doesn’t look big enough to be much of a hiding-place.’
‘You still putting your faith in those wirelesses your uncle was going to have zigzagging round?’
‘No,’ said Ardita frankly. ‘I’m all for you. I’d really like to see you get away.’
He laughed.
‘You’re our Lucky Lady. We’ll have to keep you with us as a mascot – for the present, anyway.’
‘You couldn’t very well ask me to swim back,’ she said coolly. ‘If you do, I’m going to start writing shilling shockers, founded on that history of your life you gave me last night.’
He flushed and stiffened slightly. ‘Huh,’ he said, ‘I suppose every other man you meet tells you he loves you?’
Ardita nodded.
‘Why shouldn’t he? All life is just a progression toward and then a recession from one phrase – “I love you”.’
Carlyle laughed and sat down.
‘That’s very true. That’s – that’s not bad. Did you make that up?’
‘Yes – or rather I found it out. It doesn’t mean anything especially. It’s just clever.’
‘It’s the sort of remark,’ he said gravely, ‘that’s typical of your class.’
‘Oh,’ she interrupted impatiently, ‘don’t start that lecture on aristocracy again! I distrust people who can be intense at this hour in the morning. Morning’s the time to sleep, swim and be careless.’
Ten minutes later they had swung round in a wide circle as if to approach the island from the north.
‘There’s a trick somewhere,’ commented Ardita thoughtfully. ‘He can’t mean just to anchor up against this cliff.’
They were heading straight in now toward the solid rock, which must have been well over a hundred feet tall, and not until they were within fifty yards off it did Ardita see their objective. Then she clapped her hands in delight. There was a break in the cliff entirely hidden by a curious overlapping of rocks, and through this break the yacht entered and very slowly traversed a narrow channel of crystal-clear water between high grey walls. Then they were riding at anchor in a miniature world of green and gold, a gilded bay smooth as glass and set round with tiny palms, the whole resembling the mirror lakes and twig trees that children set up in sand piles.
‘Not so bad!’ cried Carlyle excitedly. ‘That little half-breed knows his way round this corner of the planet.’
His exuberance was contagious and Ardita became quite jubilant.
‘It’s an absolutely topping hiding-place!’
‘Lordy, yes! It’s the sort of island you read about.’
The rowboat was lowered into the golden lake and they pulled ashore.
‘Come on,’ said Carlyle, as they landed in the slushy sand, ‘we’ll go exploring.’
The fringe of palms was in turn ringed in by a round mile of flat sandy country. They followed it south, and brushing through a farther rim of tropical vegetation, came out on a pearl-grey virgin beach where Ardita kicked off her brown golf shoes – she seemed to have permanently abandoned stockings – and went wading. Then they sauntered back to the yacht, where the indefatigable Babe had luncheon ready for them.
‘What’s its name?’ asked Ardita – ‘the island, I mean?’
‘No name ’tall,’ chuckled Babe. ‘Reckin she jus’ island, ’at’s all.’
Ardita thought for a moment.
‘I’ll name it,’ she said. ‘It’ll be the Isle of Illusion.’
‘Or of Disillusion,’ murmured Carlyle.
‘Disillusion, if more people know about it than Babe seems to think.’
In the late afternoon they sat with their backs against great boulders on the highest part of the cliff, and Carlyle sketched for her his vague plans. He was sure they were hot after him by this time. The total proceeds of the coup he had pulled off, and concerning which he still refused to enlighten her, he estimated as just under a quarter of a million. He counted on lying up here several weeks and then setting off southward. The details of coaling and provisioning he was leaving entirely to Babe, who, it seemed, had sailed these seas in every capacity from cabin-boy aboard a coffee trader to virtual first mate on a Chilian pirate craft, whose skipper had long since been hung.
‘If he’d been white he’d have been king of South America long ago,’ said Carlyle emphatically. ‘When it comes to intelligence he’s A number 1 at Lloyds. He’s got the guile of every race and nationality whose blood is in his veins, and that’s half a dozen or I’m a liar. He worships me because I’m the only man in the world who can play better ragtime than he can.’
‘What you going to do when you get south?’ she interrupted.
‘Take ship for India. I want to be a rajah. I mean it. My idea is to go up into Afghanistan somewhere, buy up a palace and a reputation, and then after about five years appear in England with a foreign accent and a mysterious past. But India first. Do you know, they say that all the gold in the world drifts very gradually back to India? Something fascinating about that to me. And I want leisure to read – an immense amount.’
‘How about after that?’
‘Then,’ he answered defiantly, ‘comes aristocracy. Laugh if you want to – but at least you’ll have to admit that I know what I want – which I imagine is more than you do.’
‘On the contrary.’ contradicted Ardita, reaching in her pocket for her cigarette case, ‘when I met you I was in the midst of a great uproar of all my friends and relatives because I did know what I wanted.’
‘What was it?’
‘A man.’
He started.
‘You mean you were engaged?’
‘After a fashion. If you hadn’t come aboard I had every intention of slipping ashore yesterday evening – how long ago it seems – and meeting him.’
‘But your family disapproved, eh?’
‘What there is of it – only a silly uncle and a sillier aunt.’
‘I feel rather jealous,’ said Carlyle, frowning – and then he laughed.
A pause ensued, a pause which Carlyle found rather awkward, but which Ardita seemed not to notice at all as she sat contentedly enjoying her cigarette and gazing out at the shining sea. After a minute she crawled out on the rock and lay with her face over the edge, looking down.
‘Oh, look!’ she cried. ‘There’s a lot of sort of ledges down there. Wide ones of all different heights.’
He joined her, and together they gazed down the dizzy height.
‘We’ll go swimming to-night!’ she said excitedly. ‘By moonlight.’
‘Wouldn’t you rather go in at the beach on the other end?’
‘Not a chance. I like to dive. You can use my uncle’s bathing suit, only it’ll fit you like a sack, because he’s a very fat man. I’ve got a one-piece affair that’s shocked the natives everywhere I’ve shown it.’
‘I suppose you’re a shark?’
‘Yes, I’m pretty good. And I look nice, too. A sculptor last summer told me my calves were worth one hundred pounds.’
There didn’t seem to be any answer to this, so Carlyle was silent, permitting himself only a discreet interior smile.
When the night crept down in shadowy blue and silver, they threaded the shimmering channel in the rowboat, and tying it to a jutting rock began climbing the cliff together. The first shelf was ten feet up, wide, and furnishing a natural diving platform. There they sat down in the bright moonlight and watched the faint incessant surge of the waters, almost stilled now as the tide set seaward.
‘Are you happy?’ he asked suddenly.
She nodded.
‘Always happy near the sea. You know,’ she went on, ‘I’ve been thinking all day that you and I are somewhat alike. We’re both rebels – only for different reasons. Two years ago, when I was just eighteen, and you were –’
‘Twenty-five.’
‘Well, we were both conventional successes. I was an utterly devastating debutante and you were a prosperous musician. But deep in us both was something that made us require more for happiness. I didn’t know what I wanted. I went from man to man, restless, impatient, month by month getting less acquiescent and more dissatisfied. I used to sit sometimes chewing at the insides of my mouth and thinking I was going crazy – I had a frightful sense of transiency. I wanted things now – now – now! Here I was – beautiful – I am, aren’t I?’
‘Yes,’ agreed Carlyle tentatively.
Ardita rose suddenly.
‘Wait a second. I want to try this delightful-looking sea.’
She walked to the end of the ledge and shot out over the water, doubling up in mid-air and then straightening out and entering the water straight as a blade in a perfect jack-knife dive.
In a minute her voice floated up to him.
‘You see, I used to read all day and most of the night. I began to resent society –’
‘Come on up here,’ he interrupted. ‘What on earth are you doing?’
‘Just floating round on my back. I’ll be up in a minute. Let me tell you. The only thing I enjoyed was shocking people; wearing something quite impossible and quite charming to fancy-dress parties, going round with the fastest men in Town and getting into some of the most hellish scrapes imaginable.’
The sounds of splashing mingled with her words, and then he heard her hurried breathing as she began climbing up the side to the ledge.
‘Go on in!’ she called.
Obediently he rose and dived. When he emerged, dripping, and made the climb he found that she was no longer on the ledge, but after a frightened second he heard her light laughter from another shelf ten feet up. There he joined her, and they both sat quietly for a moment, their arms clasped round their knees, panting a little from the climb.
‘The family were wild,’ she said suddenly. ‘They tried to marry me off. And then when I’d begun to feel that after all life was scarcely worth living, I found something’ – her eyes went skyward exultantly – ‘I found something!’
Carlyle waited and her words came with a rush.
‘Courage – just that; courage as a rule of life and something to cling to always. I began to build up this enormous faith in myself. I began to see that in all my idols in the past some manifestation of courage had unconsciously been the thing that attracted me. I began separating courage from the other things of life. All sorts of courage – the beaten, bloody prize-fighter coming up for more – I used to make men take me to prize fights; the déclassé woman sailing through a nest of cats and looking at them as if they were mud under her feet; the liking what you like always; the utter disregard for other people’s opinions – just to live as I liked always and to die in my own way. Did you bring up the cigarettes?’
He handed one over and held a match for her silently.
‘Still,’ Ardita continued, ‘the men kept gathering – old men and young men, my mental and physical inferiors, most of them, but all intensely desiring to have me – to own this rather magnificent proud tradition I’d built up round me. Do you see?’
‘Sort of. You never were beaten and you never apologized.’
‘Never!’
She sprang to the edge, poised for a moment like a crucified figure against the sky; then describing a dark parabola, plunked without a splash between two silver ripples twenty feet below.
Her voice floated up to him again.
‘And courage to me meant ploughing through that dull grey mist that comes down on life. My courage is faith – faith in the eternal resilience of me – that joy’ll come back, and hope and spontaneity. And I feel that till it does I’ve got to keep my lips shut and my chin high and my eyes wide – not necessarily any silly smiling. Oh, I’ve been through hell without a whine quite often – and the female hell is deadlier than the male.’
‘But supposing,’ suggested Carlyle, ‘that before joy and hope and all that came back the curtain was drawn on you for good?’
Ardita rose, and going to the wall, climbed with some difficulty to the next ledge, another ten or fifteen feet above.
‘Why,’ she called back, ‘then I’d have won!’
He edged out till he could see her.
‘Better not dive from there! You’ll break your back,’ he said quickly.
She laughed.
‘Not I!’
Slowly she spread her arms and stood there swan-like, radiating a pride in the young life within her that lit a warm glow in Carlyle’s heart.
‘We’re going through the black air with our arms wide,’ she called, ‘and our feet straight out behind like a dolphin’s tail, and we’re going to think we’ll never hit the silver down there, till suddenly it’ll be all warm round us and full of little kissing, caressing waves.’
Then she was in the air and Carlyle involuntarily held his breath. He had not realized that the dive was nearly forty feet. It seemed an eternity before he heard the swift compact sound as she reached the sea.
And it was with his glad sigh of relief when her light watery laughter curled up the side of the cliff and into his anxious ears that he knew he loved her.
With the long sunny hours Ardita’s idea of the episode as incidental, madcap, a sprig of romance in a desert of reality, gradually left her. She dreaded the time when he would strike off southward.
‘Take me with you,’ said Ardita late one night as they sat lazily in the grass under the shadowy spreading palms. ‘I’d love to reappear in ten years as a fabulously wealthy high-caste Indian lady,’ she continued.
Carlyle looked at her quickly.
‘You can, you know.’
She laughed.
‘Is it a proposal of marriage? Extra! Ardita Farnam becomes pirate’s bride. Society girl kidnapped by ragtime bank robber.’
‘It wasn’t a bank.’
‘What was it? Why won’t you tell me?’
‘I don’t want to break down your illusions.’
‘My dear man, I have no illusions about you.’
‘I mean your illusions about yourself.’
She looked up in surprise.
‘About myself! What on earth have I got to do with whatever stray felonies you’ve committed?’
‘That remains to be seen.’
She reached over and patted his hand.
‘Dear Mr Curtis Carlyle,’ she said softly, ‘are you in love with me?’
‘As if it mattered.’
‘But it does – because I think I’m in love with you.’
He looked at her ironically.
‘Thus swelling your January total to half a dozen,’ he suggested. ‘Suppose I ask you to come to India with me?’
‘Shall I?’
He shrugged his shoulders.
‘We can get married at the first port.’
‘What sort of life can you offer me? I don’t mean that unkindly, but seriously; what would become of me if the people who want that four thousand pounds reward ever catch up with you?’
‘I thought you weren’t afraid.’
‘I never am – but I won’t throw my life away just to show one man I’m not.’
‘I wish you’d been poor. Just a little poor girl dreaming over a fence in a warm cow country.’
‘Wouldn’t it have been nice?’
‘I’d have enjoyed astonishing you – watching your eyes open on things. If you only wanted things! Don’t you see?’
‘I know – like girls who stare into the windows of jewellery stores.’
‘Yes – and want the big oblong watch that’s platinum and has diamonds all round the edge. Only you’d decide it was too expensive and choose one of white gold for twenty pounds. Then I’d say, “Expensive? I should say not!” And we’d go into the store and pretty soon the platinum one would be gleaming on your wrist.’
‘That sounds so nice and vulgar – and fun, doesn’t it?’ murmured Ardita.
‘Doesn’t it? Can’t you see us travelling round and spending money right and left and being worshipped by lift boys and waiters? Oh, blessed are the simple rich, for they inherit the earth!’
‘I honestly wish we were that way.’
‘I love you, Ardita,’ he said gently.
Her face lost its childish look for a moment and became oddly grave.
‘I love to be with you,’ she said ‘more than with any man I’ve ever met. And I like your looks and your dark hair and the way you go over the side of the rail when we come ashore. In fact, Curtis Carlyle, I like all the things you do when you’re perfectly natural. I think you’ve got nerve, and you know how I feel about that. Sometimes when you’re round I’ve been tempted to kiss you suddenly and tell you that you were just an idealistic boy with a lot of caste nonsense in his head. Perhaps if I were just a little bit older and a little more bored I’d go with you. As it is, I think I’ll go back and marry – that other man.’
Over across the silver lake the figures of the crew writhed and squirmed in the moonlight, like acrobats who, having been too long inactive, must go through their tricks from sheer surplus energy. In single file they marched, weaving in concentric circles, now with their heads thrown back, now bent over their instruments like piping fauns. And from trombone and saxophone ceaselessly whined a blended melody, sometimes riotous and jubilant, sometimes haunting and plaintive.
‘Let’s dance!’ cried Ardita. ‘I can’t sit still with that perfect jazz going on.’
Taking her hand, he led her out into a broad stretch of hard sandy soil that the moon flooded with great splendour. They floated out like drifting moths under the rich hazy light, and as the fantastic symphony wept and exulted and wavered and despaired Ardita’s last sense of reality dropped away and she abandoned her imagination to the dreamy summer scents of tropical flowers and the infinite starry spaces overhead, feeling that if she opened her eyes it would be to find herself dancing with a ghost in a land created by her own fancy.
‘This is what I should call an exclusive private dance,’ he whispered.
‘I feel quite mad – but delightfully mad!’
‘We’re enchanted. The shades of unnumbered generations of cannibals are watching us from high up on the side of the cliff there.’
‘And I’ll bet the cannibal women are saying that we dance too close and that it was immodest of me to come without my nose ring.’
They both laughed softly – and then their laughter died as over across the lake they heard the trombones stop in the middle of a bar and the saxophones give a startled moan and fade out.
‘What’s the matter?’ called Carlyle.
After a moment’s silence they made out the dark figure of a man rounding the silver lake at a run. As he came closer they saw it was Babe in a state of unusual excitement. He drew up before them and gasped out his news in a breath.
‘Ship stan’in’ off ’bout half a mile, sah.’
‘A ship – what kind of a ship?’ demanded Carlyle anxiously.
Dismay was in his voice, and Ardita’s heart gave a sudden wrench as she saw his whole face suddenly droop.
‘Don’t know, sah.’
‘Are they landing a boat?’
‘No, sah.’
‘We’ll go up,’ said Carlyle.
They ascended the hill in silence, Ardita’s hand still resting in Carlyle’s as it had when they finished dancing. She felt it clench nervously from time to time as though he were unaware of the contact, but though he hurt her, she made no attempt to remove it. It seemed an hour’s climb before they reached the top and crept cautiously across the silhouetted plateau to the edge of the cliff. And after one short look Carlyle involuntarily gave a little cry. It was a revenue boat with six-inch guns mounted fore and aft.
‘They know!’ he said, with a short intake of breath. ‘They know! They picked up the trail somewhere.’
The hours passed and they lay there side by side, very silently, their chins in their hands like dreaming children.
When the colour faded from the sky and lustreless blue changed to leaden grey a commotion was visible on the ship’s deck, and they made out a group of officers clad in white duck, gathered near the rail. They had field-glasses in their hands and were attentively examining the islet.
‘It’s all up,’ said Carlyle grimly.
‘Damn!’ whispered Ardita. She felt tears gathering in her eyes.
‘We’ll go back to the yacht,’ he said, ‘I prefer that to being hunted out up here.’
Leaving the plateau, they descended the hill, and reaching the lake, were rowed out to the yacht. Then, pale and weary, they sank into the settees and waited.
Half an hour later, in the dim grey light, the nose of the revenue boat appeared in the channel and stopped. Two boats were lowered casually over the side, one containing an officer and six bluejackets, and the other four rowers and in the stern two grey-haired men in yachting flannels. Ardita and Carlyle stood up and half unconsciously started toward each other.
Suddenly, against the golden furnace low in the east, their two graceful figures melted into one, and he was kissing her spoiled young mouth.
‘It’s a sort of glory,’ he murmured after a second.
She smiled up at him.
‘Happy, are you?’
Her sigh was a benediction – an ecstatic surety that she was youth and beauty now as much as she would ever know. For another instant life was radiant and time a phantom and their strength eternal – then there was a bumping, scraping sound as the rowboat scraped alongside.
Up the ladder scrambled the two grey-haired men, the officer and two of the sailors with their hands on their revolvers. Mr. Farnam folded his arms and stood looking at his niece.
‘So,’ he said, nodding his head slowly.
With a sigh her arms unwound from Carlyle’s neck, and her eyes, transfigured and far away, fell upon the boarding party. Her uncle saw her upper lip slowly swell into that arrogant pout he knew so well.
‘So,’ he repeated savagely. ‘So this is your idea of – of romance. A runaway affair, with a – a high-seas pirate.’
Ardita considered him carelessly.
‘What an old fool you are!’ she said quietly.
And with that she turned, included the two old men, the officer and the two sailors in a curt glance of contempt, and walked proudly down the companion-way.
But had she waited an instant longer she would have heard a sound from her uncle quite unfamiliar in most of their interviews. Her uncle gave vent to a whole-hearted amused chuckle, in which the second old man joined.
The latter turned briskly to Carlyle, who had been regarding this scene with an air of cryptic amusement.
‘Well, Toby,’ he said genially, ‘you incurable, hare-brained, romantic chaser of rainbows, did you find that she was the person you wanted?’
Carlyle smiled confidently.
‘Why – naturally,’ he said. ‘I’ve been perfectly sure ever since I first heard tell of her wild career. That’s why I had Babe send up the rocket last night.’
‘I’m glad you did,’ said Colonel Moreland. ‘And we hoped we’d find you two in some such compromising position.’
‘Your father and I sat up all night hoping for the best – or perhaps it’s the worst. Lord knows you’re welcome to her, my boy. She’s run me crazy.’
‘Sh!’ said Carlyle. ‘She’s coming on deck.’
Ardita appeared at the head of the companion-way and gave a quick involuntary glance at Carlyle’s wrists. A puzzled look came over her face.
‘Ardita,’ said Carlyle unsteadily.
She swayed a step toward him.
‘Ardita,’ he repeated breathlessly, ‘I must tell you the – the truth. It was all a plant, Ardita. My name isn’t Carlyle. It’s Moreland, Toby Moreland. The story was invented, Ardita, invented out of thin air.’
She stared at him, bewildered amazement, disbelief and anger flowing in quick waves across her face. The three men held their breaths. Moreland, senior, took a step toward her; Mr. Farnam’s mouth dropped a little open as he waited, panic-stricken, for the expected crash.
But it did not come. Ardita’s face became suddenly radiant, and with a little laugh she went swiftly to young Moreland and looked up at him without a trace of wrath in her grey eyes.
‘Will you swear,’ she said quietly, ‘that it was entirely a product of your own brain?’
‘I swear,’ said young Moreland eagerly.
She drew his head down and kissed him gently.
‘What an imagination!’ she said softly and almost enviously. ‘I want you to lie to me just as sweetly as you know how for the rest of my life.’
The negroes’ voices floated drowsily back, mingled in an air that she had heard them sing before:
‘Time is a thief;
Gladness and grief
Cling to the leaf
As it yellows –’
‘What was in the bags?’ she asked softly.
‘Mud,’ he answered. ‘That was one of the two true things I told you.’
‘Perhaps I can guess the other one,’ she said; and reaching up on her tiptoes she kissed him.