Edith Nesbit - The Incredible Honeymoon

There was a little pause, and then, still less himself, he blundered into, "I say, it is jolly of you to talk to me like this."

She froze at once. "I forgot," she said, "that we had not been introduced. Thank you for reminding me."

Edward's better self was now wholly lost, and what was left of him could find nothing better to answer than, "Oh, I say!"

"What I ought to have said," she went on, her face a mask of cold politeness, "is that you can't possibly get out by the lodge. There are fierce dogs. And the lodge-keepers are worse than the dogs. If you will follow me – at a distance, for fear I should begin to talk to you again – I'll show you where the gardener's ladder is, and you can put it up against the wall and get out that way."

"Couldn't I get out where the tramps get in?" he asked, humbly. "I don't like to trouble you."

"Not from here. We should have to pass close by the house."

The "we" gave him courage. "I say – do forgive me," he said.

"There's nothing to forgive," said she.

"Oh, but do," he said, "if you'd only see it! It was just because it was so wonderful and splendid to have met you like this.. and to have you talk to me as you do to the other tramps."

"You're not a tramp," she said, "and I ought not to have forgotten it."

"But I am," said he, "it's just what I really and truly am."

"Come and get the ladder," said she, and moved toward the wall.

"Not unless you forgive me. I won't," he added, plucking up a little spirit, "be indebted for ladders to people who won't forgive a man because he speaks the truth clumsily."

"Come," she said, looking back over her shoulder.

"No," he said, obstinately, not moving. "Not unless you forgive me."

"It can't possibly matter to you whether I forgive you or not," she turned to say it. And as she spoke there came to Edward quite suddenly and quite unmistakably the knowledge that it did matter. Sometimes glimpses do thus suddenly and strangely come to us – and that by some magic inner light that is not reason we know things that by the light of reason we could never know.

"Look here," he said. "I'll go after that ladder in a minute. But first I've got something to say to you. Don't be angry, because I've got to say it. Do you know that just now – just before I said that stupid thing that offended you – you were talking to me as though you'd known me all your life?"

"You needn't rub it in," she said.

"Do you know why that is? It's because you are going to know me all your life. I'm perfectly certain of it. Somehow or other, it's true. We're going to be friends. I sha'n't need to say again how jolly it is of you to talk to me. We shall take all that as a matter of course. People aren't pitchforked into meetings like this for nothing. I'm glad I said that. I'm glad you were angry with me for saying it. If you hadn't I might just have gone away and not known till I got outside – and then it would have been a deuce and all of a business to get hold of you again. But now I know. And you know, too. When shall I see you again? Never mind about forgiving me. Just tell me when I shall see you again. And then I'll go."

"You must be mad," was all she could find to say. She had furled her sunshade and was smoothing its bamboo ribs with pink fingers.

"You'll be able to find out whether I'm mad, you know, when you see me again. As a matter of fact – which seems maddest, when you meet some one you want to talk to, to go away without talking or to insist on talk and more talk? And you can't say you didn't want to talk to me, because you know you did. Look here, meet me to-morrow morning again – will you?"

"Certainly not."

"You'll be sorry if you don't. We're like two travelers who have collected all sorts of wonderful things in foreign countries. We long to show each other our collections – all the things we've thought and dreamed. If we'd been what you call introduced, perhaps we shouldn't have found this out. But as it is, we know it."

"Speak for yourself," she said.

"Thank you," he said, seriously. "I will. Will you sit down for ten minutes? This tree-root was made for you to sit down on for ten minutes, and I will speak for myself."

"I can't," she said, and her voice – there was hurry in it, and indecision, but the ice had gone. "You must come at once for that ladder. It's getting more dangerous every moment. If any one saw you here there'd be an awful row."

"For you?"

"Yes, for me. Come on."

He followed her along the wall under the chestnuts. There was no more spoken words till they came to the ladder.

Then, "Right," he said. "Thank you. Good-by." And set the ladder against the wall.

"Good-by," said she. "I'll hand the aeroplane up to you?"

"Stand clear," he said, half-way up the ladder. "I'll give it a sideways tip from the top – it'll fall into its place. It's too heavy for you to lift. Good-by."

He had reached the top of the wall. She stood below, looking up at him.

"There won't be any row now?"

"No. It's quite safe."

"Then have you nothing to say?"

"Nothing. Yes, I have. I will come to-morrow. You'll misunderstand everything if I don't."

"Thank you," he said.

She came up the ladder, two steps, then handed him his toy. Then the ladder fell with a soft thud among the moss and earth and dead leaves; his head showed a moment above the wall, then vanished.

He went thoughtfully through the dewy grass, along the road, and back to his inn.

Tommy met him by the horse-trough. "You been flying it?" he asked, breathlessly.

"Yes. She went like a bird."

"How far did she go?" Tommy asked.

"I don't quite know," said Edward, quite truly, "how far she went. I shall know better to-morrow."

THE day was long. Though the aeroplane flew to admiration, though Tommy adored him and all his works, though the skylarks sang, and the downs were drenched in sunshine, Edward Basingstoke admitted to himself, before half its length was known to him, that the day was long.

He climbed the cliff above Cuckmere and sat in the sunshine there, where the gulls flashed white wings and screamed like babies; he watched the tide, milk-white with the fallen chalk of England's edge, come sousing in over the brown, seaweed-covered rocks; he felt the crisp warmth of the dry turf under his hand, and smelt the sweet smell of the thyme and the furze and the sea, and it was all good. But it was long. And, for the first time in his life, being alone was lonely.

And for the second time since the day when Charles, bounding at him from among the clean straw of an Oxford stable, had bounded into his affections, he had left that strenuous dog behind.

He got out his road map and spread it in the sun – with stones at the corners to cheat the wind that, on those Downs, never sleeps – and tried to believe that he was planning his itinerary, and even to pretend to himself that he should start to-morrow and walk to Lewes. But instead his eyes followed the map's indication of the road to that meadow where the red wall was, and presently he found that he was no longer looking at the map, but at the book of memory, and most at the pictures painted there only that morning. Already it seemed a very long time ago.

"I am afraid," said Mr. Basingstoke, alone at the cliff's edge, "that this time it really is it . It's different from what I thought. It's confoundedly unsettling."

Like all healthy young men, he had always desired and intended to fall in love; he had even courted the experience, and honestly tried to lose his heart, but with a singular lack of success. In the girls he had met he had found gaiety, good looks, and a certain vague and general attractiveness – the common attribute of youth and girlhood – but nothing that even began to transfigure the world as his poets taught him that love should transfigure it. The little, trivial emotions which he had found in pressing hands and gazing into eyes had never lured him further than the gaze and the hand-clasp. Yet he had thought himself to be in love more than once.