An Idyll of the Sea

By BARRY PAIN.

HE repellent midday meal grew to its untidy close in a frowsy boarding-house in one of the less-pleasing back streets of Sefton-on-Sea. Mr. Sigismund Porter had eaten so remarkably little that he might almost have won an approving smile from the hawk-eyed proprietress. As a rule, Mr. Porter was a young man who liked value for his money, but to-day there was something on his mind, a gloomy resolution which destroyed his appetite.

"I am going," he said to himself, "to put my cards down on the table. I am going to own up, and to act on the square, and to be chucked for doing it, and to leave this blighted place to-morrow."

In his small bedroom at the very top of the house he arrayed himself with his usual scrupulous care. He wore a pair of the yellowest boots in Sefton-on-Sea, waistcoat and trousers of grey flannel, a dark blue smoking-jacket of the reach-me-down or Edgware Road order, and a straw hat adorned with the bewitching colours of the Advance Guard Club. His necktie was of the palest saffron, saving for such stains as it had acquired by natural wear and tear. He surveyed himself in the looking-glass and was satisfied.

Considering that he was really rather a nice-looking young man, he was a pretty bad sight. He had dark, wavy hair, and a girl had once said that he had the most pathetic eyes in Brixton. He lived at Brixton, and so did the girl. That was now merely an incident in the dead past.

He selected one of those cigarettes the principal characteristic of which is that you get an amazing amount of them for threepence. He shut the case with a snap—a real silver case which gave him pleasure—and so he went forth jauntily. He was going to his doom, of course, and he knew that he was going to his doom. But as his way to his doom lay along the sea-front, it was as well for the present to keep up appearances. From the sea-front he reached the pier, cast down his penny at the turnstiles, and walked up to the further end of it to a secluded seat behind the little pavilion where they let the entertainments loose. There he waited, leaning forward with his rather weak chin on the handle of his walking-stick. For a moment the wicked thought flashed across him that there was no necessity for him to put his cards down on the table, that he might as well have played the game out to the end. He cast the temptation from him. He would lose the girl, of course, but there was the very devil in it. He would rather lose her fairly than leave her with the glittering but untrue portrait of himself that she must now possess.

He looked up and saw the girl herself walking towards him.

"Walks like a queen," he said to himself. "Walks as if she'd bought the whole place and could pay for it—and she gets thirty bob a week from a Dover Street milliner. You couldn't hardly believe it." Then he arose and lifted his absurd hat.

The girl shook hands with him frankly. She was simply and quietly dressed, but perhaps her profession gave her advantages there.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Porter," she said. "You are getting splendid weather for your last day here." She was a pretty girl with enigmatical eyes, and her voice was softer and pleasanter than the voice of Mr. Sigismund Porter.

"Yes," said Mr. Porter gloomily. "The weather's a bit of all right, I suppose, if the weather were everything."

"But the weather is quite a good deal, isn't it?" said the girl cheerfully. "You wouldn't enjoy your run on your motor-car up to the Lakes if it came on wet."

"There ain't going to be any run," said the young man.

"What? But what about your friends, Colonel Raynes and Lord Daybrooke? You can't disappoint them."

"I shan't," he said bitterly. "They won't be disappointed, because they don't exist. I haven't got any colonels and lords amongst my friends. It was all lies and brag. For that matter, I haven't got any friends except one girl, and she's just going to give me the chuck for taking her in."

"I see," said the girl thoughtfully. "Would you mind very much if we left this disgusting, vulgar little pier and walked along by the sands? They begin to make music of sorts here directly, and it will be quieter out of the crowd."

The thought flashed into his mind that it was hardly worth while to pay a penny for the pier and leave it at the end of five minutes, for his mind was perforce economical. But money questions at the moment seemed too sordid.

"All right," he said. "Considering the way I've carried on—I may say the rotten way I've carried on—it's pretty decent of you to hear the story out. I suppose I could kick up some sort of an excuse."

"Perhaps I could find the excuses for you," said the girl, as they went down together on to the beach. "You are not really stopping at the Grand, then?"

"No, I'm not. I've been stopping at the cheapest and muckiest boarding-house in the place, and in a mortal funk all the time lest you should see me going in and out. Well, that's all over, at any rate. You know the worst now. The way it started was that I wanted to impress you a bit. I wanted to make myself out one of the lucky ones. I wanted to seem a superior class to you altogether. And that's the funny thing about it. All the time that I was bragging about motor-cars, and you were talking about the stuffy workrooms, you were the superior class to me, and I was the dirt under your feet. Looking back on it, I can't think how I came to make such a fool of myself. Your superior, indeed! Why, even on the outside facts I'm not that, for I only make twenty-eight bob to your thirty, and I haven't got your chance of a rise."

"I think I see how it all happened," said the girl. "It was all very natural. I was sorry you told me those fibs, but I was not half as sorry then as I am glad now when you've taken them back again."

"Hold on," said the man. "I mean, just half a moment, if you don't mind. You said you were sorry when I began blowing about my position and all that. You knew, then?"

"Yes," said the girl. "I knew all the time. And all the time I was rather thinking that you wouldn't go on with it."

The young man stared at her hard. "You beat me altogether," he said. "I can't make head or tail of it. Of course, you've had opportunities of picking up style in your work, and there's no manner of doubt that you've got it. Well, I've known other girls who worked at a milliner's who have done the same. What beats me is that you've got that way of thinking. That's where they slip up. They say it all right, but what they say is all wrong. It's the same here, for the matter of that," he added gloomily.

"Now I want to talk to you," said the girl. "We are out of the crowd here. Let's sit down. I've got to apologise to you, too, you know. I've told you lies, too. I never worked for a milliner in my life. I've got a motor-car and more money than I want, and I am stopping at the very hotel where you said you were."

"I take it," said the young man quietly, "that this is about the last straw. If you'll permit one question, miss, that being the case, why on earth did you ever let me speak to you?"

"We will both be honest now," said the girl. "I saw you several times, and always alone. You did not seem to be having a particularly happy holiday. I saw that you wanted to talk to me. The book that I left on the seat gave you your chance, but I did not leave my book there on purpose. I had not even made up my mind at the moment when you brought it to me what I would do. When you began to talk, I saw that right at the back of all the talk you were quite a good young man. You always treated me properly and with respect."

"The man's not been born yet who would dare do anything else."

The girl laughed. "Well, I was inclined to like you. I don't value what you call the outside facts so very very much. I rather like doing something unconventional, if it is not actually wrong. I thought it would please you if I let you meet me sometimes."

"That's rather a mild way of putting it."

"It pleased me, too. At the back of everything that was wrong in you there were such lots and lots of good. I don't want you to look on it as simply an idle experiment on my part. Perhaps there was a slight shade of that in it, and I am rather ashamed of it. But it was chiefly that I wanted you to have a rather happier time here."

"I believe all that," said Mr. Porter, "and I did have a happier time here. But think how I've got to pay for it afterwards! There's the contempt you must have felt for me—that's a nice sort of thing to have in your mind when you can't sleep at night! By Heavens!" he burst out with sudden ferocity, "you lied worse than I did. You did more harm."

"Now you talk like a man," she said. "But you're mistaken on one point. There was never any contempt. All the time I was thinking that in your circumstances I should probably have been sorely tempted to do exactly as you did. Think of that when you can't sleep."

"That isn't everything," said the young man, jabbing holes in the sand with his stick.

"Isn't it?" said the girl. "What's the rest?"

"Thanks," said the young man bitterly, "but I'm not going to make a fool of myself again. You go and become what you pretended to be. Come to me as a thirty-bob-a-week girl, working for a milliner, then I'll tell you the rest fast enough. Now I'm going to say 'Good-bye' to you."

"I think I see," said the girl. "That could never have been in any circumstances. But because I want you to know that I'm a friend to you, good-bye." She held out both her hands to him. "And remember this." Then she put her face up to his and kissed him.

In a moment she was gone.

The young man remained standing there. "And," he said to himself, "one ought to go straight up to heaven in a chariot of golden fire."