Mr Pringle’s stomach, which was less humble, rumbled.
‘Have you walked upon the bottom of the sea, Mr Pringle?’ the German asked.
‘Eh?’ said Mr Pringle. ‘No.’
His eyes, however, had swum into unaccustomed depths.
‘I have not,’ said Voss. ‘Except in dreams, of course. That is why I am fascinated by the prospect before me. Even if the future of great areas of sand is a purely metaphysical one.’
Then he threw up a little pebble, which had been changing colour in his hand, turning from pale lavender to purple, and caught it before it reached the sun.
The audience of healthy young men laughed at this German cove, their folded arms stretching the cloth still tighter on their backs.
Poor Mr Bonner was desperately ashamed. He would have liked to push the fellow off somewhere, and intended in future to reserve the luxury of their association for private occasions, although the present one was certainly no fault of his.
He thought of his wife. And frowned at his niece.
Laura Trevelyan was at that moment tracing with her toe the long, ribbony track of some sea-worm, as if it had been important. In the rapt afternoon all things were all-important, the inquiring mouths of blunt anemones, the twisted roots of driftwood returning and departing in the shallows, mauve scum of little bubbles the sand was sucking down, and the sun, the sun that was hitting them over the heads. She was too hot, of course, in the thick dress that she had put on for a colder day, with the result that all words became great round weights. She did not raise her head for those the German spoke, but heard them fall, and loved their shape. So far departed from that rational level to which she had determined to adhere, her own thoughts were grown obscure, even natural. She did not care. It was lovely. She would have liked to sit upon a rock and listen to words, not of any man, but detached, mysterious, poetic words that she alone would interpret through some sense inherited from sleep. Herself disembodied. Air joining air experiences a voluptuousness no less intense because imperceptible.
She smiled a little at this solution of sea and glare. It was the sun that was reddening her face. The hem of her skirt had become quite irregular, she saw, with black scallops of heavy water.
‘I say, Laura,’ said Willie Pringle, coming up, ‘we have had no races this picnic, and a picnic is not a picnic without races, do you think?’
Willie Pringle was a boy, or youth, or young man by courtesy, who was rather loosely made, or had not hardened yet, with a rather loose, wet, though obviously good-natured mouth, and eyes that so far nobody had suspected of understanding. He had but recently joined the firm of his father and uncles, the solicitors, as office boy or very junior clerk, and was still feeling important.
‘Do you really think races are necessary?’ asked Laura, who had raced in the past, but who was now tracing through some slow necessity of her own the path of the sea-worm with her toe.
‘Well, no, races are not necessary. But are they not the sort of thing that people do at a picnic?’ Willie said, who wanted very badly to do those things which people did.
‘Silly Willie!’ Laura laughed, lazily but lovingly.
Willie laughed too.
He would have liked to share with Laura esoteric jokes and tastes. Once he had done a drawing of her, not because he was in love, he had not thought about that, but because her image had invaded his mind with immense power and brooding grief. Then, because his drawing was an empty, aching thing, his recurring failure, he had quickly torn it up.
‘No,’ his voice shouted, at a picnic. ‘It is not NECESSARY. But everyone is waiting. All these children. Let us do something.’
But Laura would not join in.
Mrs Bonner wished that Willie Pringle had been a few years older, which perhaps would have simplified matters; things do arrange themselves by propinquity, and Willie was an eldest son, of prospects, if not physical charms. Mrs Pringle, however, did not share Mrs Bonner’s wish. Herself more than rich, she did naturally aspire to consort with money. Moreover, she held a private opinion, very private indeed, that Laura Trevelyan was sly.
One young man, in bone and orange skin, had begun to tell of the prevalence of worms in his merino flock at Camden. His elders followed his account with appeased eyes. Everyone was glad after the rankling experience of demoniac words to which they had been subjected by the German, who still stood there, though reduced, picking at his finger-nails.
For two pins I would run him down the beach by his coat collar, said Mr Bonner, who had sided finally with the sheep.
‘But we must do something,’ protested Willie Pringle. ‘If not races, then I must think of some idea. You, Laura, if only you would help. Some game, or something. Or they might collect driftwood, and pile it into a heap, and light a bonfire.’
‘Are you so desperate?’ asked Laura Trevelyan.
He was, but did not know it yet.
‘They are wasting the afternoon!’
His mouth worked, upon the beginnings of words, or laughter, and gave up.
Even as a little boy Willie Pringle had a suspicion that a great deal depended on him, but what it was he had not found out. So far his efforts had been confined to desperate attempts to copy the behaviour, to interpret the symbols of his class, and thus solve the mystery of himself. But all truths were locked. So he would look at the heartbreaking beauty and simplicity of a common table or kitchen chair, and realize that in some most important sense their entities would continue to elude him unless he could escape from the prison of his own skull. Sometimes he would struggle like an epileptic of the spirit to break out. The situation had made his hands moist and his limbs more rubbery and ineffectual than they should have been. People laughed at him a good deal. They had not yet made up their minds whether he was a monster, or a sleepwalker, or what. Later, when they found out, they would probably shun him.
Belle solved Willie’s immediate problem by an inspiration of her own. She came running, together with two Pringles, two little girls, who had to hold on, either to her flying skirt, or preferably to some part of her inspired form. They would manacle her wrists with hot hands whenever she stopped short. Belle had taken her bonnet off. Her hair fell gold. Her skin, too, was golden, beneath the surface of which the blood was clearly rioting, and as she breathed, it did seem almost as though she was no longer the victim of her clothes.
‘Wait, Belle! Wait!’ cried the little girls.
‘Wait for us,’ called several others.
Ah, Belle is released, Laura Trevelyan saw, and was herself closer to taking wing.
Belle had a spray of the crimson bottlebrush that she had torn off recklessly. It was quite a torch flaming in her hand. She had in her skirt several smooth pebbles, in dove colours, and a little, flat, red tile, and a lump of green glass, which the bubbles made most desirable.
‘Where are we going?’
The little girls’ voices were imperious, if frail.
Several boys left off torturing one another and ran in the wake of the girls, demanding a dénouement.
‘We are going to build a temple,’ Belle called.
Blood will veil blushes. Besides, she was very young herself.
‘Anyone would think that Belle was twelve,’ complained Una Pringle, who arranged the flowers most mornings for her mother.
‘What temple?’ some screamed.