XIV
As Felix said, “pep” had been the mot juste for the way Carston behaved. When he had found that there was no train that night, he had walked across the valley. There he had discovered a coastguard, and, practically unaided, the system by which the station wireless picked up the lighthouse, and from there communicated by telegraph with Starn. From this, he produced a taxi and a lodging for the night. He walked back and packed vigorously, kneeling on the floor, his back to the window and the wood. When he had seen Scylla passing upstairs with her brother, he had shut his door, ceased to hear the silence of the house, heard instead the wood, a little restless, its branches changing places in a wind risen suddenly off the sea.
Odd that he would not see the place again; have no part with its men, or possess its woman. Never found out what had really happened.
He was still on the crest of the energy he had spent in denouncing them in a general sensation of burned boats. There had not risen yet doubt of himself, scrutiny, not of his motives, he knew better than to do that, but of the figure he had cut. Yet, his angry elation was like a fir-cone fire, needing baskets of brittle wood-shells. He had a fine story for his friends, something to think about. Scylla written off as a bad job, as a romance. It seemed equally impossible to say goodbye, to leave without saying it. Then the old nurse knocked, told him that his taxi was there, and that Mr. Felix, Miss Scylla, and Mr. Ross wished him a pleasant journey. He tipped her enormously, slipped across the verandah, fearing heads that were not watching. With jars and jerks, the taxi crept up the long hill.
Divine escape. On the down-crest, the earth was a map of naked beauty he saw in the piece and understood. “I’ve been living inside a work of art”—living what was meant to be looked at, not lived in; not to be chewed, swallowed, handled, kissed. He lay back, rocking over the grass track, almost satisfied with this. A piece of life, definitely over for him, with the stone age, and the Middle Ages, and—A patch of purple gauze ahead, smoke of no earthly fire, now a patch of those tall, bee-shaken spikes they called foxgloves. As they passed it, he saw thin legs stuck out of it along the earth, a body backed against the flower wall. It was Picus out there, up there. Looking out at nothing; out to sea. Sitting on the top of the world.