Not George Washington | Page 3

more rhythmically than the dancers
of the Assembly Rooms.
The constraint which had been upon us during our former conversation
vanished at breakfast. We were both hungry, and we had a common
topic. We related our story of the sea in alternate sentences. We ate and
we talked, turn and turn about. My mother listened. To her the affair,
compared with the tremendous subjects to which she was accustomed
to direct her mind, was broad farce. James took it with an air of
restrained amusement. I, seriously.
Tentatively, I diverged from this subject towards other and wider fields.
Impressions of Guernsey, which drew from him his address, at the St.
Peter's Port Hotel. The horrors of the sea passage from Weymouth,
which extorted a comment on the limitations of England. England.
London. Kensington. South Kensington. The Gunton-Cresswells? Yes,
yes! Extraordinary. Curious coincidence. Excursus on smallness of
world. Queer old gentleman, Mr. Gunton-Cresswell. He is, indeed.

Quite one of the old school. Oh, quite. Still wears that beaver hat? Does
he really? Yes. Ha, ha! Yes.
Here the humanising influence of the Teutonic school of philosophic
analysis was demonstrated by my mother's action. Mr. Cloyster, she
said, must reconcile himself to exchanging his comfortable rooms at
the St. Peter's Port--("I particularly dislike half-filled hotel life, Mrs.
Goodwin")--for the shelter of our cottage. He accepted. He was then
"warned" that I was chef at the cottage. Mother gave him "a chance to
change his mind." Something was said about my saving life and
destroying digestion. He went to collect his things in an ecstasy of
merriment.
At this point I committed an indiscretion which can only be excused by
the magnitude of the occasion.
My mother had retired to her favourite bow-window where, by a tour
de force on the part of the carpenter, a system of low, adjustable
bookcases had been craftily constructed in such a way that when she sat
in her window-seat they jutted in a semicircle towards her hand.
James, whom I had escorted down the garden path, had left me at the
little wooden gate and had gone swinging down the road. I, shielded
from outside observation (if any) by a line of lilacs, gazed rapturously
at his retreating form. The sun was high in the sky now. It was a perfect
summer's day. Birds were singing. Their notes blended with the gentle
murmur of the sea on the beach below. Every fibre of my body was
thrilling with the magic of the morning.
Through the kindly branches of the lilac I watched him, and then, as
though in obedience to the primaeval call of that July sunshine, I stood
on tiptoe, and blew him a kiss.
I realised in an instant what I had done. Fool that I had been. The
bow-window!
I was rigid with discomfiture. My mother's eyes were on the book she
held. And yet a faint smile seemed to hover round her lips. I walked in

silence to where she sat at the open window.
She looked up. Her smile was more pronounced.
"Margie," she said.
"Yes, mother?"
"The hedonism of Voltaire is the indictment of an honest bore."
"Yes, mother."
She then resumed her book.


CHAPTER 2
JAMES SETS OUT _(Miss Margaret Goodwin's narrative continued)_
Those August days! Have there been any like them before? I realise
with difficulty that the future holds in store for me others as golden.
The island was crammed with trippers. They streamed in by every boat.
But James and I were infinitely alone. I loved him from the first, from
the moment when he had rowed out of the unknown into my life, clad
in a dressing-gown. I like to think that he loved me from that moment,
too. But, if he did, the knowledge that he did came to him only after a
certain delay. It was my privilege to watch this knowledge steal
gradually but surely upon him.
We were always together; and as the days passed by he spoke freely of
himself and his affairs, obeying unconsciously the rudder of my tactful
inquisitiveness. By the end of the first week I knew as much about him
as he did himself.
It seemed that a guardian--an impersonal sort of business man with a

small but impossible family--was the most commanding figure in his
private life. As for his finances, five-and-forty sovereigns, the remnant
of a larger sum which had paid for his education at Cambridge, stood
between him and the necessity of offering for hire a sketchy
acquaintance with general literature and a third class in the classical
tripos.
He had come to Guernsey to learn by personal observation what
chances tomato growing held out to a young man in a hurry to get rich.
"Tomato growing?" I echoed dubiously. And then, to hide