“There!” It was as though she had now
done something she much wanted to do; as one says
“There!” on at last sitting down after
much fatigue.
She tossed her gauntlets on to a chair. She walked
past him towards the window. “You got my
letter?”
“Yes.”
Her face was averted. Her voice had not the bantering
note with which she had spoken at her entry.
“You never answered it.”
“Well, I’d just seen you—just
before I got it.”
She was looking out of the window. “Why
haven’t you been up?”
“Oh—I don’t know. I was
coming.”
“Well, I had to come,” she said.
He made no reply. He could think of none to make.
She turned sharply away from the window and came towards
him, radiant again, as at her entry. And in her
first bantering tone, “I know you hate it,”
she smiled, resuming her first suggestion, “me
coming here, like this. It makes you feel uncomfortable.
You always feel uncomfortable when you see me, Marko.
I’d like to know what you thought when they
told you I was here—”
He started to speak.
She went on, “No, I wouldn’t. I’d
like to know just what you were doing before they
told you. Tell me that, Marko.”
“I believe I wasn’t doing anything.
Just thinking.”
“Well, I like you best when you’re thinking.
You puzzle, don’t you, Marko? You’ve
got a funny old head. I believe you live in your
old head, you know. Puzzling things. Clever
beast! I wish I could live in mine.”
And she gave a note of laughter.
“Where do you live, Nona?”
“I don’t live. I just go on”—she
paused—“flotsam.”
Strange word to use, strangely spoken!
It seemed to Sabre to drop with a strange, detached
effect into the conversation between them. His
habit of visualising inanimate things caused him to
see as it were a pool between them at their feet, and
from the word dropped into it ripples that came to
his feet upon his margin of the pool and to her feet
upon hers.
He took the word away from its personal application.
“I believe that’s rather what I was thinking
about when you came, Nona. About how we just
go on—flotsam. Don’t you know
on a river where it’s tidal, or on the seashore
at the turn, the mass of stuff you see there, driftwood
and spent foam and stuff, just floating there, uneasily,
brought in and left there—from somewhere;
and then presently the tide begins to take it and
it’s drawn off and moves away and goes—somewhere.
Arrives and floats and goes. That’s mysterious,
Nona?”
She said swiftly, as though she were stirred, “Oh,
Marko, yes, that’s mysterious. Do you know
sometimes I’ve seen drift like that, and I’ve
felt—oh, I don’t know. But I’ve
put out a stick and drawn in a piece of wood just
as the stuff was moving off, just to save it being
carried away into—well, into that, you
know.”
