The Rain-Girl/Chapter 13
CHAPTER XIII
A QUESTION OF ANKLES
PLEASE may I come and talk to you while you finish breakfast?"
Beresford had almost concluded his own meal when Lola entered the room, the ever faithful Mr. Byles in attendance. Later he had stepped across to her table.
"I started this morning feeling like a boy scout," he continued; "like several boy scouts, I might say," he added, as he dropped into the chair to which she motioned him.
"A boy scout!" She looked up from a piece of toast she was buttering.
"I simply yearned to make every one happy. I was most aggressively eupeptic."
"Is that why you came over to talk to me?" she enquired without looking up from her plate.
"I'm always doing good deeds for you," he said reproachfully.
Her eyes questioned him.
"I keep from you the Thirty-Nine Articles."
She smiled and nodded.
"One morning," he continued, "you will look across at my table and see my chair empty."
"How do you know I shall look across?" she challenged, darting him a look from beneath her lashes.
"You are merely interrupting the story," he said severely. "One morning you will look across at my table and find it empty," he repeated. "Later in the day there will be a great disturbance when my body is found weltering in its own blood. Heroes of romance always welter in their own blood," he added.
"Heroes of romance!" she repeated with uplifted brows. "Are you one?"
"I am the hero of my own romance," he retorted; "but you interrupt me. I had just got to where I was weltering in my own blood—the victim of the Thirty-Nine Articles."
She laughed.
"And ever afterwards," he proceeded, "I shall share with the Roman sentry, Casabianca and Jack Cornwell their laurels for devotion to duty."
"I should have preferred to be regarded as a pleasure," she said demurely.
"It's my duty to protect my pleasure," he retorted quietly.
"But you were saying you felt like a boy scout"
"Like several boy scouts," he corrected. "I felt as Ulysses must have felt when he saw them dragging the wooden horse into Troy, or Leonidas at Thermopylae, or Mr. Lloyd George when he heard that Mr. Asquith had been defeated at East Fife; in other words, I felt extremely well and happy. Then I suddenly caught sight of a girl at the table by the window, and it made me" he paused.
"Was it love at first sight?" she asked quietly.
"And then," he continued, "I found this fair world was not so fair. Nature had suddenly administered a cold douche in the shape of a pair of calves that terminated suddenly in shapeless feet."
"Whatever do you mean?" she cried, laughing.
"Merely that like Godfrey Elton, I'm very sensitive about ankles."
"But what have this girl's ankles to do with you?" She crinkled up her brows in a way she had when puzzled.
"They spoiled my breakfast," he complained, "and I'm afraid they're going to spoil the whole day for me."
"You are funny," she smiled. "I don't understand you in the least. I always thought that Englishmen were unapproachable in the morning; but you are more ridiculous in the morning than during the rest of the day."
"Imagine the state of mind of a woman conscious that Nature has left her like an unfinished symphony," he continued. "She must tremble every time she opens a fashion paper, lest some readjustment of the surface of exposure shall betray her."
"But we are not all Greeks," she suggested.
"A woman doesn't require to be a Greek to be conscious of Nature's inexplicable oversights in modelling," he retorted.
"I decline to discuss anatomy so soon after breakfast," she laughed as she rose. "I shall be about ten minutes," she threw at him over her shoulder as she walked towards the door.
Beresford sauntered through the vestibule, and stood smoking on the hotel steps watching the sparkle of the sea.
Presently Lola joined him and they set out in the direction of Hythe. For some time they walked in silence; Beresford sucking moodily at his pipe.
"Is anything the matter?" she enquired at length.
"Everything's the matter," he grumbled. "What right has Nature to produce anything so appalling as that poor girl?"
"Oh, I see," she said.
"Thick ankles, no taste in dress, sandy hair, sand-coloured eyelashes, spectacles. Shapeless, hopeless and alone."
"But" began Lola.
"If you want a more comprehensive list of feminine disabilities," he continued, "you are insatiable. Such people are a challenge to religious belief." There was a note of gloomy indignation in his voice.
"But perhaps she's happy," suggested Lola.
"Happy!" cried Beresford. "Would you be happy if you were in her place?"
She shuddered slightly.
"What right has Nature to give you all that she has given you, and deny that girl all she has denied her. How can she have a good time?"
She looked at him swiftly. He was in deadly earnest.
"Perhaps she doesn't mind," she suggested tentatively.
"Doesn't mind?" he cried. "What woman doesn't mind being unattractive? Imagine what she must feel when she sees you."
Again she flashed at him an enquiring look; but there was nothing in his face suggestive of a compliment.
"You have all she lacks," he continued, "and it's all—it's all—oh, absolutely rotten," he finished up, ejecting the ashes from his pipe by knocking it vigorously upon the handle of his stick. Then a moment later catching her eye he laughed. "I suppose I'm on my hobby-horse," he said.
"But why bully me?" she asked plaintively.
"Was I bullying you?" he said. "I'm dreadfully sorry; but such things render me capable of bullying the Fates themselves. You see I was just cataloguing that poor girl's disabilities when you came into the room, and it made me feel a selfish beast."
"But how?" she asked.
"Don't you see I ought to be trying to give her a good time instead of"
"Giving me a good time," she suggested avoiding his gaze.
"Letting you give me a good time," he concluded. "Oh! let's sit down, perhaps I shall get into a better humour if I listen to the larks. Yet it makes me murderous when I think of those old ruffians in Rome who considered larks' tongues a delicacy."
"Don't you think you would be better if I left you alone?" she suggested, as he dropped down upon the grass beside her.
"Good heavens, no!" he cried, looking across at her. "What an awful idea."
"But you seem so" she hesitated.
"Well, I'll forget those utilitarian ankles," he smiled.
"I want to talk to you," she said hesitatingly. "Seriously," she added, as he smiled across at her. "Has it ever struck you that everything ends?" She kept her face averted.
"It has." He plucked a strong-looking blade of grass and proceeded to use it as a pipe-cleaner.
For some minutes there was silence.
"I said it has," he repeated, looking up from his occupation.
She still kept her eyes fixed upon a little clump of grass with which she was toying.
"You've been very nice to me," she began in a low voice.
"I have," with decision.
She looked up quickly. "Are you laughing at me?" she asked simply. There was in her eyes just a suspicion of reproach.
To Beresford she seemed to possess the power of expressing her every emotion without the necessity for speech. Her eyes, he decided for the thousandth time, were the most wonderful ever bestowed upon woman.
"I was not," he said in reply to her question.
"But you are not being serious, are you?" There was the simplicity of a child in the look that accompanied her words.
"Must I be serious?" he asked, pocketing his pipe and taking out his cigarette-case.
"Pleeeeeease."
Again there was silence, during which Beresford lighted a cigarette.
"I just wanted you to know," she said.
"That I had been nice to you?"
She nodded.
"Thank you."
"I don't like men," she began, and then hesitated.
"As a conversational opening to set me at my ease" he began with a smile.
"Now you are not being serious," she protested. "What I wanted to tell you was" again she paused, "that—that—you have been so different from the others."
"Shall we take all that for granted?" He smiled across at her a friendly, understanding smile.
"Oh yes, let's," she cried with a sigh of relief; "I have been wanting to tell you only I Of course, it seems silly, doesn't it?"
"Does it?"
"Now," she continued with a great air of decision, "there's the other thing."
"Is that serious also?" he asked quizzically.
She nodded vigorously.
"I'm afraid I'm going to be very rude," she cried with a sudden change of manner. The rapid alternations of her moods always charmed him.
"To preserve the balance?" he suggested, "you have my full permission."
"And you won't be cross?" she queried a little anxiously.
"I promise to combine the patience of Job with the restraint of William the Silent."
"Suppose" she began, then paused.
"Suppose what?"
"Suppose you thought I was going to do something very—very foolish, what would you do?"
"Envy the happy man."
"Oh, please be serious," she pleaded with a slight blush, biting her under-lip to hide the smile that his retort had called up.
"Listen to that lark." Beresford lifted his eyes in an endeavour to discover the bird from which came the flood of song. "Suppose you were to ask him to be serious," he suggested. "I'm too happy to be serious."
"But you are not" she hesitated.
"Still, I'll promise."
"You know you worry me."
"Worry you?" Suddenly for Beresford the lark ceased its song, and the sunshine lost its joyousness.
"I mean I'm worried about you."
"For that re-arrangement of words I thank you."
"Please," she pleaded.
"I thought you meant that I was a nuisance. If I am you will tell me, won't you?" The earnestness of his manner was unmistakable.
"Please don't be foolish," she said reproachfully. "I know it's impertinent of me; but I wish you would tell me about yourself, about"
"About myself?" he queried. "I've told you all there is to tell."
"I mean about the future," she persisted.
"Like the mule, I have no future."
She turned her head aside, and mechanically began to pluck blades of grass.
"You see," she began, her head still averted.
"I'm sorry; but I don't."
"You're most horribly difficult to talk to," she said, screwing up her eyebrows.
"But you said"
"You promised to be serious, please—pleeeease be nice."
Be nice! Did she know that she was tormenting him, that she was maddening, that she was irresistible in that porridge-coloured frock—that was the nearest he could get to the actual tint—and that floppy sort of hat with orange ribbon, and her grey suede shoes and stockings? What an ankle!
"I'll be as serious as my situation," he said, seeing reproach in the eyes she turned to him. "Honest Injun."
She smiled and nodded at the childish phrase.
"You were talking the other day " she said, then stopped.
"Why not blurt it out," he suggested.
"Well, it hurts me to hear you talk as if nothing matters, as if life"
"'Life is a watch and a vision, between a sleep and a sleep?'" he quoted.
"Yes; but Swinburne meant it beautifully, not as something to be got rid of. When I was a kiddie," she continued inconsequently, "I used to tear my pinnies when anybody offended me."
"And you regard me as wanting to tear my pinny," he continued gravely.
She nodded, with a flicker of a smile. "You're not cross with me?" She looked at him anxiously.
Why not end it by telling her everything. Instead he heard himself saying:
"I suppose it was really self-pity that made me sorry for that girl with the ankles."
"I once read somewhere," she said gravely, looking him straight in the eyes, "that we are all of us influenced to some degree by every one we meet. I wish" she stopped.
"You wish that you could influence me to turn over a new leaf and become a sort of New Year resolution."
She looked at him reproachfully.
"It's easy for a woman to preach the gospel of content, particularly when she has all that makes for content. You would probably suggest the colonies, or America, thinking of The Silver King or Andrew Carnegie, or"
"Please don't, you are hurting me."
Both the words and the tone were so simple that he stopped abruptly. She turned aside. He could see her lower lip was indrawn.
"Forgive me," he said contritely, "I'm all jangly to-day. It's that girl's ankles," he added whimsically. "I didn't want to be serious; but you would make me, and now you're angry."
Her head was still turned from him. What a brute he had been, and how sensitive she was.
"Lola, please forgive me."
It was the first time he had used her name. It slipped out unconsciously. He thrilled at the sound. She turned, tears dewing her lower lashes. Then with a sudden movement she sprang up.
"Now we must be going," she cried with a sudden change of mood; "I do nothing but eat, sleep and sit about. You know," she said turning to him with a smile, "we women have to consider our figures, and you're helping me to ruin mine."
Beresford followed her, his mind in a whirl at the sudden change in her mood.
For the rest of the morning she was in the highest of high spirits. She insisted on scrambling down to the water, and soon succeeded in getting both her own and Beresford's feet soaked.
"Look!" she cried, drawing back her skirts to show the darker line just above her ankles where the water had reached.
"I'm just as wet, and a lot more uncomfortable," he replied lugubriously, as he looked down at his brown boots discoloured by the sea-water. "I hate walking in wet boots."
She laughed gaily, then a moment after darted off like the wind.
"Let's run," she cried over her shoulder.
Beresford started after her, conscious of the absurd figure he must appear stumbling through the shingly sand after this fleet-footed creature.
Presently she dropped down suddenly, he almost falling over her.
"That was good," she panted, looking up at him with burning cheeks and sparkling eyes. "I feel like a mad thing this morning. What do you think of me?" she challenged.
"I think I would rather not say," he said quietly as he sank down beside her, and she turned and for some time sat looking out to sea.