Across the Stream

"I so much hope that you and Helena will stop with us. You must think of it as a great kindness to me, for it will be the utmost comfort to me, now that both my girls are married, to have you two with me for the rest of the season. I spoke to Archie about it while we were at Silorno, so ask him whether he approves or not. I hope all goes well with you. Is Archie quite black yet from bathing? Send me a line as soon as you have thought it over. Helena is having the greatest success in town; every one thinks her charming, and admires her enormously."

Jessie read this over as she waited for Archie to rejoin her at breakfast. There was every reason for accepting so cordial an invitation, and it would give pleasure to Helena, to Cousin Marion, and apparently also to Archie. She knew she would have to consent: there was no cause that could be spoken about which she could possibly adduce for refusing. A week ago that cause did not exist, but now she wondered how she could bear to see Helena and Archie in the close companionship which this would imply, and watch his feeling for her expanding from the bud into the flower. If she had thought that Helena loved him it would all be different. But she felt certain that Helena did not. There, for her, was the poignancy of it…

In a manner that she could not explain, Jessie knew that she knew the tokens by which love betrays its existence. She, barely yet twenty-two, had somewhere stored in her soul the language of love, which it speaks even when it thinks it is dumb – talking in its sleep, it may be. She had seen in the last week of Helena's sojourn here that Archie talked to her like that. "There was neither speech nor language": he said nothing of which the words betrayed his dawning passion, but his love spoke in his silence, even as the rosy clouds high above the earth herald the dawn. It was her own knowledge that enlightened her: she too knew the silent language, and knew that Archie conversed in it, though no word came, when he talked to Helena. Something kindled behind his eye, some secret alertness possessed him… But there was the defencelessness and the blindness of love, for when Helena answered him she but pretended to talk the same tongue, and Jessie, knowing it, knew that she spoke a mere paltry gibberish. It sounded the same, or it looked the same; but it was nonsense, it was not authentic. Yet Archie never talked in the secret tongue to Jessie; and, in consequence, she had never answered him in it. To-day it seemed her native tongue when she talked to him, and all she said must needs be translated out of that into the language of those who were friends, dear friends, but no more than friends.

All this was instantaneous: she seemed to read it between the lines of Helena's letter. She recalled, too, between the lines, the tokens that she knew. Archie would look at Harry, as they sat at dinner, then at his mother, then at her, in order that in due time he might look at Helena. And when he spoke to any of them they never got more than one ear and an inattentive mind from him. The other ear and the attention were always with Helena. Helena knew that quite well: no woman or girl could fail to know it, and, by way of response, she had made this Scythian retreat to England. No doubt that was clever of her, but in Jessie's opinion clever people are found out even sooner than stupid ones. The only inexplicable folk are the wise, and wisdom has very little to do with cleverness. Wisdom is perhaps the cleverness of the soul, that looks down with pity on the manoeuvres of the mind.

Archie made his absurd entry. He had a dressing-gown on, perhaps some sort of abbreviated bathing-dress, and canvas-shoes.

"I didn't dress," he said, "for where's the use of dressing if you are going to undress again almost immediately?"

"Aren't you going to work this morning?" asked Jessie.

"No. This one day, as Mr. Wordsworth said, we'll give to idleness. I'm going to bathe all the morning instead of half the morning. I want a holiday. I think I'm overworked. What's happening in that foolish England, if you've read the papers?"

"I haven't," said she.

Suddenly his face changed; he began to talk the secret language, which

Jessie understood and Helena counterfeited.

"And what other news?" he asked. "You had a letter from somebody."

Jessie pretended not to understand what she knew so well.

"Yes, I did have a letter," she said, determined that Archie should be more direct than this.

"From Helena or mother?" he said carelessly. "I haven't heard from either of them, except that telegram to say they had got home safely."

He was talking the secret language still; the very carelessness of his tone betrayed it.

"I heard from them both," she said. "The letter was from Helena, and there was an enclosure from Cousin Marion."

Archie said nothing in answer to this, but it seemed to the girl that his silence was just as eloquent in the language without words. Eventually he remarked that Harry was very late, and Jessie knew that he had beaten her. He always did, just because he had nothing, with regard to her, at stake.

"Archie, I want to talk to you about what they have written to me," she said.

"Talk away," said Archie. "I say, what good little fishes!"

Jessie was not proposing to yield like that. If he, in the code of the secret language, professed an indifference to what he was longing to hear, she would be indifferent too.

To Archie's intense irritation she continued to talk about little fishes, in a tone of great interest, till Harry's entrance. She agreed they were very good; probably they were fresh sardines caught last night by the fishers. Or were they… and she could not remember the Italian name of the other little fish which were so like sardines.

Archie's serene brow clouded, and he but grunted a greeting to Harry. And next moment her heart smote her. She knew how easily Archie could put the sun out for her without meaning to do it, but she had, out of a sort of piqued femininity, intentionally done the same for him. She felt as if she had spoiled a child's pleasure. He was so like a child, but lovers were made of child-stuff. He got up almost immediately, and, full of a tender penitence, she followed him.

One behind the other they went out into the garden, where Archie, in a superb unconsciousness of her presence, became instantly absorbed in the despised English papers.

"Archie!" she said.

He rustled with his paper.

"Oh, er – what?" he answered.

"I wanted to talk to you about Helena's letter," she said, "only you would talk about sardines. Put that paper down; I can't talk through the paper."

She noticed that he kept his finger on a paragraph, and she would have betted her last shilling that he had no idea what that paragraph was about. And, though a moment before she had been penitent, now she stiffened herself and determined that he should meet her more gracefully than that.

"I'm sorry; I'm interrupting you," she said. "I'll tell you some other time."

Archie suddenly threw the paper into the air.

"Oh, aren't we behaving like idiots?" he said. "At heart I am, and so are you really. But I'll confess: I'm just longing to know what Helena writes about. But aren't you an idiot, too? I shall like it enormously if you say you are."

"I am an idiot, too," said the girl. "And Cousin Marion wants Helena and me to live with her till father comes home. She told me to ask you if you approved."

He leaned forward to her.

"Ah, do, Jessie," he said. "I hope you will. I can't see why you shouldn't. Can you?"

She looked straight into the eager blue eyes that were so close to hers. For her there was a wealth of frankness and friendliness, but the light in them was not for her, and she knew it.

"Helena wants to," she said.

"Does that mean that you don't?" he asked. "I'm sorry if that is so."

She got up.

"No, it doesn't mean that a bit," she said. "It's delightful of you and

Cousin Marion to want us. Of course we'll come."

Archie rose too.

"That's perfectly ripping of you," he said. "We shall be a jolly party, we four."

Quite suddenly a pause fell, very awkwardly, very constrainedly.

"You see, my father doesn't appear much," he said at length. "That's what I meant. He is very often in the country, and – well, we don't see him much."

Archie soon took himself off to the sea, armed with paper and pencils, for, with four hours in front of him, there would be much basking to be done between his bathes. Already another of those sea-sketches was beginning to take shape in his mind, and he found that there was no hour so fruitful in inspiration as when, after a swim, he returned to this empty, sandy beach, and lay spread out to the sun to be dried and browned and made eager for another dip. So, to-day, after the first swim, he lay for a while on his back with his arms across his face to shield his eyes from the glare, and opened his brain, so to speak, to let the sea-thoughts invade it. They came swarming in at his invitation, and presently he turned over and propped himself on his elbow and began to catch them and pin them to his paper. The rim of the sea, with its weed-fringed rocks, its diaper of moving light in the shallow water, the shoals of little fishes, almost invisible one moment, the next, as they turned, becoming a shield of silver flakes, were all ready to be hammered into sentences; and yet the hammer paused…

Somehow at the back of his mind was a topic that inhibited his hand, or would not allow the connection between hand and brain to be made, and he thought he knew what this was, for only this morning he had heard that Helena was to be an inmate of their house in London. Yet it did not seem to be that which was preventing him, and he wondered whether it was the thought of his father and his habitual intoxication, which was always like a black background at home, and which just for a moment had popped out into his conversation with Jessie, that hindered him. But that again did not seem a sufficient cause for his inability to start the mechanism which translated thought into language.

And then he became aware that his fingers itched and ached to write with a compelling force which he knew well. And yet only yesterday Martin had said that he should not come to him again. But the quality of the force seemed unmistakable, and presently he yielded to that which he really had not the power to resist and wrote as his hand bade him write.

There were but a few sentences scribbled, and then his pencil, as usually happened when the message was complete, gave a dash. He had no notion what he had written, and when it was finished he read it through.

"Archie, I have come through this once more," it said, "to repeat that you have been warned. But I can't get through again. – MARTIN."