STRETCHED out under an awning on the deck of the Ibis, NickLansing looked up for a moment at the vanishing cliffs of Maltaand then plunged again into his book.
He had had nearly three weeks of drug-taking on the Ibis. Thedrugs he had absorbed were of two kinds: visions of fleeinglandscapes, looming up from the blue sea to vanish into itagain, and visions of study absorbed from the volumes piled upday and night at his elbow. For the first time in months he wasin reach of a real library, just the kind of scholarly yetmiscellaneous library, that his restless and impatient spiritcraved. He was aware that the books he read, like the fugitivescenes on which he gazed, were merely a form of anesthetic: heswallowed them with the careless greed of the sufferer who seeksonly to still pain and deaden memory. But they were beginningto produce in him a moral languor that was not disagreeable,that, indeed, compared with the fierce pain of the first days,was almost pleasurable. It was exactly the kind of drug that heneeded.
There is probably no point on which the average man has moredefinite views than on the uselessness of writing a letter thatis hard to write. In the line he had sent to Susy from GenoaNick had told her that she would hear from him again in a fewdays; but when the few days had passed, and he began to considersetting himself to the task, he found fifty reasons forpostponing it.
Had there been any practical questions to write about it wouldhave been different; he could not have borne for twenty-fourhours the idea that she was in uncertainty as to money. Butthat had all been settled long ago. From the first she had hadthe administering of their modest fortune. On their marriageNick's own meagre income, paid in, none too regularly, by theagent who had managed for years the dwindling family properties,had been transferred to her: it was the only wedding present hecould make. And the wedding cheques had of course all beendeposited in her name. There were therefore no "business"reasons for communicating with her; and when it came to reasonsof another order the mere thought of them benumbed him.
For the first few days he reproached himself for his inertia;then he began to seek reasons for justifying it. After all, forboth their sakes a waiting policy might be the wisest he couldpursue. He had left Susy because he could not tolerate theconditions on which he had discovered their life together to bebased; and he had told her so. What more was there to say?
Nothing was changed in their respective situations; if they cametogether it could be only to resume the same life; and that, asthe days went by, seemed to him more and more impossible. Hehad not yet reached the point of facing a definite separation;but whenever his thoughts travelled back over their past life herecoiled from any attempt to return to it. As long as thisstate of mind continued there seemed nothing to add to theletter he had already written, except indeed the statement thathe was cruising with the Hickses. And he saw no pressing reasonfor communicating that.
To the Hickses he had given no hint of his situation. WhenCoral Hicks, a fortnight earlier, had picked him up in thebroiling streets of Genoa, and carried him off to the Ibis, hehad thought only of a cool dinner and perhaps a moonlight sail.
Then, in reply to their friendly urging, he had confessed thathe had not been well--had indeed gone off hurriedly for a fewdays' change of air--and that left him without defence againstthe immediate proposal that he should take his change of air onthe Ibis. They were just off to Corsica and Sardinia, and fromthere to Sicily: he could rejoin the railway at Naples, and beback at Venice in ten days.
Ten days of respite--the temptation was irresistible. And hereally liked the kind uncomplicated Hickses. A wholesomehonesty and simplicity breathed through all their opulence, asif the rich trappings of their present life still exhaled thefragrance of their native prairies. The mere fact of being withsuch people was like a purifying bath. When the yacht touchedat Naples he agreed since they were so awfully kind--to go on toSicily. And when the chief steward, going ashore at Naples forthe last time before they got up steam, said: "Any letters forthe post, sir?" he answered, as he had answered at each previoushalt: "No, thank you: none."Now they were heading for Rhodes and Crete--Crete, where he hadnever been, where he had so often longed to go. In spite of thelateness of the season the weather was still miraculously fine:
the short waves danced ahead under a sky without a cloud, andthe strong bows of the Ibis hardly swayed as she flew forwardover the flying crests.
Only his hosts and their daughter were on the yacht-of coursewith Eldorada Tooker and Mr. Beck in attendance. An eminentarchaeologist, who was to have joined them at Naples, hadtelegraphed an excuse at the last moment; and Nick noticed that,while Mrs. Hicks was perpetually apologizing for the great man'sabsence, Coral merely smiled and said nothing.
As a matter of fact, Mr. and Mrs. Hicks were never as pleasantas when one had them to one's self. In company, Mr. Hicks ranthe risk of appearing over-hospitable, and Mrs. Hicks confuseddates and names in the desire to embrace all culture in herconversation. But alone with Nick, their old travelling-companion, they shone out in their native simplicity, and Mr.
Hicks talked soundly of investments, and Mrs. Hicks recalled herearly married days in Apex City, when, on being brought home toher new house in Aeschylus Avenue, her first thought had been:
"How on earth shall I get all those windows washed?"The loss of Mr. Buttles had been as serious to them as Nick hadsupposed: Mr. Beck could never hope to replace him. Apart fromhis mysterious gift of languages, and his almost superhumanfaculty for knowing how to address letters to eminent people,and in what terms to conclude them, he had a smattering ofarchaeology and general culture on which Mrs. Hicks had learnedto depend--her own memory being, alas, so inadequate to therange of her interests.
Her daughter might perhaps have helped her; but it was not MissHicks's way to mother her parents. She was exceedingly kind tothem, but left them, as it were, to bring themselves up as bestthey could, while she pursued her own course of self-development. A sombre zeal for knowledge filled the mind ofthis strange girl: she appeared interested only in freshopportunities of adding to her store of facts. They wereilluminated by little imagination and less poetry; but,carefully catalogued and neatly sorted in her large cool brain,they were always as accessible as the volumes in an up-to-datepublic library.
To Nick there was something reposeful in this lucid intellectualcuriosity. He wanted above all things to get away fromsentiment, from seduction, from the moods and impulses andflashing contradictions that were Susy. Susy was not a greatreader: her store of facts was small, and she had grown upamong people who dreaded ideas as much as if they had been acontagious disease. But, in the early days especially, whenNick had put a book in her hand, or read a poem to her, herswift intelligence had instantly shed a new light on thesubject, and, penetrating to its depths, had extracted from themwhatever belonged to her. What a pity that this exquisiteinsight, this intuitive discrimination, should for the most parthave been spent upon reading the thoughts of vulgar people, andextracting a profit from them--should have been wasted, sinceher childhood, on all the............