O father, mother, let me be,
Never again shall I have rest.
For as I lay beside the sea,
A woman walked the waves to me,
And stole the heart out of my breast.
Sir Hugh and the Mermaiden.
CHAPTER V
ROGER FINDS THE ISLAND
It goes without saying that I have a retentive memory. Of course I depend very largely upon it for all the small details that Roger has from time to time vouchsafed me in regard to his relations with Margarita, or I could not very well be writing these idle memories, but Roger was always a poor writer—that is to say, so far as comment and amplification and variety of manner may be supposed to make a good one. Witness the following letter, which I received in answer to my plea for details of that strange night journey from New York to Margarita's town. It left a gap in my story of which I never happened to receive any account, and it seemed to me a fairly important gap, though you will see that this was not Roger's view of it.
Dear Jerry:
It is rather late in the day to ask me about that trip to——. We hardly spoke for a long time, as I am sure I have told you before—either of us. There was no berth to be had for her and no drawing-room car on, so we rode all night in the day coach with a rather mixed lot. I remember they snored and it amused her. She wanted to wake them up and I had to speak sharply to prevent her. The air got very bad and I took her out on the platform for a while. I remember there were any amount of stars and the moon out, too. You know she never talked much. About one o'clock we got to S—— and changed cars for a few minutes' wait. … I think it was then that she asked me abruptly what I meant by a "convent." She said it in French and I saw that she spoke and understood the language, but only in a simple, childish sort of way. I told her it was a big school. "What is that?" she said. … There were a number of Italians on the train, and they were chattering like magpies, but she paid no attention to them, and I was sure she did not understand them. At—— we got out and I asked her if there would be any livery stable open at that hour, for it was not more than four o'clock. She did not know, of course, what a livery stable was and told me that we must either go in a boat or walk. So we walked. The sun rose while we were walking. I think this is all you wanted.
There you have it! Could anything be simpler? "I remember there were any amount of stars … You know she never talked much."—Oh, Roger, Roger! Must you always have the doing and I the telling? Even to this day, though I would cut off this hand for you, I am jealous of you. "The sun rose while we were walking"! Ah me, to walk with Margarita through the dawn! She was the very dawn of life herself, untarnished, unfatigued, unashamed. To me who have known her, other women are as pictures in a gallery—lovely pictures, many of them, but a little faded and fingermarked, somehow.
We shall have to take that walk for granted. I know that it consisted of a quarter-mile of sleeping village, three quarters of a mile of scattered houses, two miles of widely separated farms and then two last miles of bayberry, salt meadow, coarse grass, rocky sand and blue, inrolling seas. I know how the salty, strengthening air blew Roger's lungs clean of the frightful murk of the car, how the strange, stunted windrocked trees gave an odd, unreal air of Japan to that bleak shore; I can half close my eyes now and lo, Atami and her thundering, surf-swept beach broadens out before me, and the breakers as they come pounding in, chase—not the withered, monkeylike old priest who searches endlessly for something in the sea-weed, girding his clean, faded robe above his bare sticks of legs—but Margarita and me. The camphor trees lose their lacquered green and turn to distant chestnut; the scarlet lily fades to a dull rose marsh flower; the lines of the temple are only quaintly-eaved rocks and ledges, and I am over seas again. I wonder if that is the reason I love this place so? But there were no geyser baths there and I had no rheumatism then! Tout lasse, tout casse, tout passe—even the sciatic nerve, we will hope.
Well, then, after they had made what Roger with his usual accuracy in such matters took for nearly five miles, it occurred to him to ask Margarita how it was that she knew her way so well, for she went through pastures, broken walls, here and there a bit of the country road, with the air of long practice. At first she would not tell him. I can imagine that slanting school-boy look, that quietly malicious indrawing of the corners of the mouth: the most enchanting obstinacy conceivable. They were following at the time a narrow beaten path, perhaps a cattle track, but that was not her guide, for often such a path curved and returned aimlessly on itself or branched off quite widely from the direction she took. At first, as I say, she was deaf to his question, but when he repeated it, patiently, I have no doubt, but evidently determined upon an answer, she yielded, as we all yield to Roger in the end, and confessed that she had once followed Hester to the village and back by this road. Hester had never guessed it, never in fact turned her back when once started, and it had been easy to keep her in sight. At the edge of the town Margarita had felt a little shy and apprehensive of her fate if discovered, so she had sat by the wood-side till Hester appeared again and followed her meekly home.
Since then I have been able to gather some idea of Hester's appearance from various sources, and I own that the situation has always seemed to me picturesque in the extreme: the tall, gaunt, silent woman in her severe, dull dress striding through the pastures, and behind her, stealthily as an Indian—or an Italian avenger—the dark, lovely child, now crouching amongst the bayberry, now defiantly erect, but always graceful as a panther, her hair loose on her slender shoulders. I cannot forbear to add that in this picture of mine, a great vivid letter burns on the woman's breast, inseparable from her name, of course. But this only adds to the sombre power of the picture. It is a thing for Vedder to paint, in witchlike browns and greys.
Margarita had never made this journey but once, but she followed her old trail with the precision of a savage. I myself have gone that way once only: and then but half of the distance, or a little less. It was not in bayberry time, but through a land smooth and blue-white with snow and with a terror pulling my heart out that I am sure I could never endure again. How we flew over the snow! It was all a ghastly glare, a dancing sun in a turquoise sky … No, no, one does not live through such things twice and I hate even the memory of it. Even with the boiling geyser rumbling behind me, filling the baths with comfort and oblivion, I shiver to my very marrow.
After they had followed a certain marshy band of vivid green for several pasture-lengths, Margarita shook her head slightly, retraced her steps and stopped at a point where three or four great flat stones made a sort of causeway across the glistening, muddy strip, and Roger, following her as she jumped lightly over, saw that they stood upon a little rocky promontory joined only by this strange bit of marsh to the mainland. The strip was here not a hundred feet wide, and winding in on either side of this two little inlets crept sluggishly along and lost themselves in the marsh. The promontory was there very barren and it seemed to Roger that the girl was going to lead him out into the shallow cove that faced them, but a few more steps showed him that just here the point of land curved around this cove, which swept far inland, and broadened out wonderfully into several acres of meadow-hay dotted with sparse, stunted cedars.
Directly before him lay a wet, shining beach, for the tide was half gone, and a hundred yards out, the tops of what might almost have been a built wall of nasty pointed rocks formed a perfect lagoon across the face