Boys were pressing.
‘Of a goddess.’
‘What goddess?’
Sand flew.
‘We shall have to decide,’ Belle called over her shoulder.
A great train of worshippers was now ploughing the sand, making it spurt up, and sigh. Some of the boys tossed their caps in the air as they ran, and allowed them to plump gaily upon the golden mattress of the beach.
‘Belle has gone mad,’ said Willie Pringle, with dubious approval.
Matters had been taken out of his hands. This was usually the case. Trailing after Belle’s votaries, he stopped to touch periwinkles and taste the shining scales of salt, and although he had not yet learnt to resign himself to his nature and his lot, his senses did atone in very considerable measure for his temporary discontent.
At least, the men talking upon the rocks were no longer paramount. This was clear. Something had been cut, Una and Laura both knew, whether the German did or not; in any event, the latter was himself a man.
Men are certainly necessary, but are they not also, perhaps, tedious? Una Pringle debated.
Una and Laura began to extricate themselves.
‘Woburn McAllister, the one who has been telling about the worms, is the owner of a property that many people consider the most valuable in New South Wales,’ Una remembered, and cheered up. ‘He must, by all accounts, be exceedingly rich.’
‘Oh,’ said Laura.
Sometimes her chin would take refuge in her neck; it could not sink low enough, or so it felt.
‘In addition to his property, Woburn Park, he has an interest in a place in New England. His parents, poor boy,’ continued Una, as she had been taught, ‘both died while he was a baby, so that his expectations were exchanged for a considerable fortune right at the beginning. And there are still several uncles, either childless or bachelors. With all of whom, Woburn is on excellent terms.’
Laura listened to Voss’s feet following her shame in soft, sighing sand. Una did look round once, but only saw that German, who was of no consequence.
‘And such a fine fellow. Quite unspoilt,’ said Una, who had listened a lot. ‘Of excellent disposition.’
‘I cannot bear so much excellence,’ Laura begged.
‘Why, Laura, how funny you are,’ said Una.
But she did blush a little, before remembering that Laura was peculiar. There is nothing more odious than reserve, and Una knew very little of her friend. But for the fact that they were both girls, they would have been in every way dissimilar. Una realized that she always had disliked Laura, and would, she did not doubt, persist in that dislike, although there was every reason to believe they would remain friends.
‘You take it upon yourself to despise what is praiseworthy in order to appear different,’ protested the nettled Una. ‘I have noticed this before in people who are clever.’
‘Oh dear, you have humbled me,’ Laura Trevelyan answered simply.
‘But Miss Pringle is right to admire such an excellent marriage party as Mr McAllister,’ contributed Voss, drawing level.
Shock caused the two girls to drop their personal difference.
‘I was not thinking of him as exactly that,’ Una declared.
Although, in fact, she had been. Lies were not lies, however, if told in the defence of honour.
‘Still,’ she added, ‘one cannot help but wonder who will get him.’
‘Quite right,’ agreed Voss. ‘Mr McAllister is obviously one of the corner-stones.’
He was kicking the sand as he walked, so that it flew in spurts of blue-whiteness before becoming wind.
‘I have passed through that property,’ he said. ‘I have seen his house. It will resist time indefinitely, as well as many of the insect pests.’
Una had begun to glow.
‘Have you been inside?’ she asked. ‘Have you seen the furniture? It is said to be magnificent.’
Laura could not determine the exact reason for her own sadness. She was consumed by the intense longing of the waves. The forms of burnt rock and scraggy pine were sharpening unbearably. Her shoulders felt narrow.
‘I would not want,’ she began.
The disappearing sand that spurted up from Voss’s feet did fascinate.
‘What?’ Una asked severely.
‘I would not want marriage with stone.’
Una’s laugh was thin.
Though what she did want, Laura did not know, only that she did. She was pursued by a most lamentable, because so unreasonable, discontent.
‘You would prefer sand?’ Voss asked.
He stooped and picked up a handful, which he threw, so that it glittered, and some of it stung their faces.
Voss, too, was laughing.
‘Almost,’ said Laura, bitterly now.
She was the third to laugh, and it seemed with such freedom that she was no longer attached to anyone.
‘You will regret it,’ laughed Voss, ‘when it has all blown.’
Una Pringle began to feel that the conversation was eluding her, so that she was quite glad when the solid form of her mother appeared on the edge of the scrub, ostensibly calling for added assistance with cups and things.
This left Voss and Laura to follow vaguely. It was not exactly clear what they should do, only that they were suddenly faced with a great gap to fill, of space, and time. Peculiarly enough, neither of them was appalled by the prospect, as both might have been earlier that afternoon. Words, silences, and sea air had worked upon them subtly, until they had undergone a change.
Walking with their heads agreeably bowed beneath the sunlight, they listened to each other’s presence, and became aware that they were possibly more alike than any other two people at the Pringles’ picnic.
‘Happy is the assured Miss Pringle,’ Voss was then saying, ‘in her material future, in her stone house.’
‘I am not unhappy,’ Laura Trevelyan replied, ‘at least, never for long, although it is far from clear what my future is to be.’
‘Your future is what you will make it. Future,’ said Voss, ‘is will.’
‘Oh, I have the will,’ said Laura quickly. ‘But I have not yet grasped in what way I am to use it.’
‘This is something which perhaps comes later to a woman,’ said Voss.
Of course, he could be quite insufferable, she saw, but she could put up with it. The light was gilding them.
‘Possibly,’ she said.
Actually, Laura Trevelyan believed distinction between the sexes to be less than was usually made, but as she had remained in complete isolation of ideas, she had never dared speak her thoughts.
It was so calm now that they had rounded a buttress of rock. The trees were leaning out towards them with slender needles of dead green. Both the man and the woman were lulled into living inwardly, without shame, or need for protection.
‘This expedition, Mr Voss,’ said Laura Trevelyan suddenly, ‘this expedition of yours is pure will.’
She turned upon him an expression of such limpid earnestness that, in any other circumstances, he would have been surprised.
‘Not entirely,’ he said. ‘I will be under restraint by several human beings, to say nothing of the animals and practical impedimenta my patrons consider necessary.’
‘It would be better,’ he added abruptly, ‘that I should go barefoot, and alone. I know. But it is useless to try to convey to others the extent of that knowledge.’
He was grinning in a way which made his face most irregular, leaner. His lips were thin and cracked before the season of thirst had set in, and there was a tooth missing at one side. Altogether, he was unconvincing.
‘You are not going to allow your will to destroy you,’ she said rather than asked.
Now she was very strong. For a moment he was grateful, though he would not have thanked. He sensed how she would have taken his head, and laid it against her breast, and held it with firm hands. But he had never allowed himself the luxury of other people’s strength, preferring the illusion of his own.