Waves with white tops came leaping over the blue. Pearl watched them break on a long piece of land covered with gardenpath shells. They drove round a corner.
There were some little houses down close to the sea, with wood fences round them and gardens inside. They comforted her. Pink and red and blue washing hung over the fences, and as they came near more people came out, and five yellow dogs with long thin tails. All the people were fat and laughing, with little naked babies holding on to them or rolling about in the gardens like puppies. Pearl was lifted down and taken into a tiny house with only one room and a verandah. There was a girl there with two pieces of black hair down to her feet. She was setting the dinner on the floor. “It is a funny place,” said Pearl, watching the pretty girl while the woman unbuttoned her little drawers for her. She was very hungry. She ate meat and vegetables and fruit and the woman gave her milk out of a green cup. And it was quite silent except for the sea outside and the laughs of the two women watching her.
“Haven’t you got any Houses of Boxes?” she said. “Don’t you all live in a row? Don’t the men go to offices? Aren’t there any nasty things?”
They took off her shoes and stockings, her pinafore and dress. She walked about in her petticoat and then she walked outside with the grass pushing between her toes. The two women came out with different sorts of baskets. They took her hands. Over a little paddock, through a fence, and then on warm sand with brown grass in it they went down to the sea. Pearl held back when the sand grew wet, but the women coaxed, “Nothing to hurt, very beautiful. You come.” They dug in the sand and found some shells which they threw into the baskets. The sand was wet as mud pies. Pearl forgot her fright and began digging too. She got hot and wet, and suddenly over her feet broke a little line of foam. “Oo, oo!” she shrieked, dabbling with her feet, “Lovely, lovely!” She paddled in the shallow water. It was warm. She made a cup of her hands and caught some of it. But it stopped being blue in her hands. She was so excited that she rushed over to her woman and flung her little thin arms round the woman’s neck, hugging her, kissing...
Suddenly the girl gave a frightful scream. The woman raised herself and Pearl slipped down on the sand and looked towards the land. Little men in blue coats—little blue men came running, running towards her with shouts and whistlings—a crowd of little blue men to carry her back to the House of Boxes.
(1910)
THE JOURNEY TO BRUGES
“You got three-quarters of an hour,” said the porter. “You got an hour mostly. Put it in the cloak-room, lady.”
A German family, their luggage neatly buttoned into what appeared to be odd canvas trouser legs, filled the entire space before the counter, and a homoeopathic young clergyman, his black dicky flapping over his shirt, stood at my elbow. We waited and waited, for the cloak-room porter could not get rid of the German family, who appeared by their enthusiasm and gestures to be explaining to him the virtue of so many buttons. At last the wife of the party seized her particular packet and started to undo it. Shrugging his shoulders, the porter turned to me. “Where for?” he asked.
“Ostend.”
“Wot are you putting it in here for?” I said, “Because I’ve a long time to wait.”
He shouted, “Train’s in 2.20. No good bringing it here. Hi, you there, lump it off!”
My porter lumped it. The young clergyman, who had listened and remarked, smiled at me radiantly. “The train is in,” he said, “really in. You’ve only a few moments, you know.” My sensitiveness glimpsed a symbol in his eye. I ran to the book-stall. When I returned I had lost my porter. In the teasing heat I ran up and down the platform. The whole travelling world seemed to possess a porter and glory in him except me. Savage and wretched I saw them watch me with that delighted relish of the hot in the very much hotter. “One could have a fit running in weather like this,” said a stout lady, eating a farewell present of grapes. Then I was informed that the train was not yet in. I had been running up and down the Folkstone express. On a higher platform I found my porter sitting on the suit case.
“I knew you’d be doin’ that,” he said, airily.
“I nearly come and stop you. I seen you from’ ere.”
I dropped into a smoking compartment with four young men, two of whom were saying good-bye to a pale youth with a cane. “Well, good-bye, old chap. It’s frightfully good of you to have come down. I knew you. I knew the same old slouch. Now, look here, when we come back we’ll have a night of it. What? Ripping of you to have come, old man.” This from an enthusiast, who lit a cigar as the train swung out, turned to his companion and said, “Frightfully nice chap, but—lord—what a bore!” His companion, who was dressed entirely in mole, even unto his socks and hair, smiled gently. I think his brain must have been the same colour: he proved so gentle and sympathetic a listener. In the opposite corner to me sat a beautiful young Frenchman with curly hair and a watch-chain from which dangled a silver fish, a ring, a silver shoe, and a medal. He stared out of the window the whole time, faintly twitching his nose. Of the remaining member there was nothing to be seen from behind his luggage but a pair of tan shoes and a copy of The Snark’s Summer Annual.
“Look here, old man,” said the Enthusiast, “I want to change all our places. You know those arrangements you’ve made—I want to cut them out altogether. Do you mind?”
“No,” said the Mole, faintly. “But why?”
“Well, I was thinking it over in bed last night, and I’m hanged if I can see the good of us paying fifteen bob if we don’t want to. You see what I mean?” The Mole took off his pince-nez and breathed on them. “Now I don’t want to unsettle you,” went on the Enthusiast, “because, after all, it’s your party—you asked me. I wouldn’t upset it for anything, but—there you are—you see—what?”
Suggested the Mole: “I’m afraid people will be down on me for taking you abroad.”
Straightway the other told him how sought after he had been. From far and near, people who were full up for the entire month of August had written and begged for him. He wrung the Mole’s heart by enumerating those longing homes and vacant chairs dotted all over England, until the Mole deliberated between crying and going to sleep. He chose the latter.
They all went to sleep except the young Frenchman, who took a little pocket edition out of his coat and nursed it on his knee while he gazed at the warm, dusty country. At Shorncliffe the train stopped. Dead silence. There was nothing to be seen but a large white cemetery. Fantastic it looked in the late afternoon sun, its full-length marble angels appearing to preside over a cheerless picnic of the Shorncliffe departed on the brown field. One white butterfly flew over the railway lines. As we crept out of the station I saw a poster advertising the Athenaeum. The Enthusiast grunted and yawned, shook himself into existence by rattling the money in his trouser pockets. He jabbed the Mole in the ribs. “I say, we’re nearly there! Can you get down those beastly golf-clubs of mine from the rack?” My heart yearned over the Mole’s immediate future, but he was cheerful and offered to find me a porter at Dover, and strapped my parasol in with my rugs. We saw the sea. “It’s going to be beastly rough,” said the Enthusiast, “Gives you a head, doesn’t it? Look here, I know a tip for sea-sickness, and it’s this: You lie on your back—flat—you know, cover your face, and eat nothing but biscuits.”
“Dover!” shouted a guard.
In the act of crossing the gangway we renounced England. The most blatant British female produced her mite of French: we “S’il vous plaît’d” one another on the deck, “Merci’d” one another on the stairs, and “Pardon’d” to our heart’s
