7

It was three days later. They had spent an afternoon and a night at Polperro, and the sun shone in the morning on that incredible place as they rode out of it after breakfast. Polperro shakes the soul and the aesthetic nerves like a gla.s.s of old wine; no one can survey it unmoved, or leave it as he entered it, any more than you can come out of a fairy ring as you went in. In the afternoon they had bathed in the rock pools along the coast. In the evening the moon had magically gleamed on the little town, and Barry and Gerda had sat together on the beach watching it, and then in the dawn they had risen (Barry and Gerda again) and rowed out in a boat to watch the pilchard haul, returning at breakfast time sleepy, fishy and bright-eyed.

As they climbed the steep hill path that leads to Talland, the sun danced on the little harbour with its fishing-boats and its sad, crowding, crying gulls, and on the huddled white town with its narrow crooked streets and overhanging houses: Polperro had the eerie beauty of a dream or of a little foreign port. Such beauty and charm are on the edge of pain; you cannot disentangle them from it. They intoxicate, and pierce to tears. The warm morning sun sparkled on a still blue sea, and burned the gorse and bracken by the steep path's edge to fragrance. So steep the path was that they had to push their bicycles up it with bent backs and labouring steps, so narrow that they had to go in single file. It was never meant for cyclists, only for walkers; the bicycling road ran far inland.

They reached the cliff's highest point, and looked down on Talland Bay.

By the side of the path, on a gra.s.s plateau, a stone war-cross reared grey against a blue sky, with its roll of names, and its comment--"True love by life, true love by death is tried...."

The path, become narrower, rougher and more winding, plunged sharply, steeply downwards, running perilously along the cliff's edge. Nan got on her bicycle.

Barry called from the rear, "Nan! It can't be done! It's not rideable.... Don't be absurd."

Nan, remarking casually "It'll be rideable if I ride it," began to do so.

"Madwoman," Barry said, and Kay a.s.sured him, "Nan'll be all right. No one else would, but she's got nine lives, you know."

Gerda came next behind Nan. For a moment she paused, dubiously, watching Nan's flying, brakeless progress down the wild ribbon of a footpath, between the hill and the sea. A false swerve, a failure to turn with the path, and one would fly off the cliff's edge into s.p.a.ce, fall down perhaps to the blue rock pools far below.

To refuse Nan's lead now would be to fail again in pluck and skill before Barry. "My word, Nan, you're a sportsman!" Barry had said, coughing weakly on the rock onto which Nan had dragged them all out of the sea.

That phrase, and the ring in his hoa.r.s.e voice as he said it, had stayed with Gerda.

She got onto her bicycle, and shot off down the precipitous path.

"My G.o.d!" It was Barry's voice again, from the rear. "Stop, Gerda ... oh, you little fool.... _Stop_...."

But it was too late for Gerda to stop then if she had tried. She was in full career, rushing, leaping, jolting over the gorse roots under the path, past thought and past hope and oddly past fear, past anything but the knowledge that what Nan did she too must do.

Strangely, inaptly, the line of verse she had just read sung itself in her mind as she rushed.

"True love by life, true love by death is tried...."

She took the first sharp turn, and the second. The third, a right angle bending inward from the cliff's very edge, she did not take. She dashed on instead, straight into s.p.a.ce, like a young Phoebus riding a horse of the morning through the blue air.

8

Nan, far ahead, nearly on the level, heard the crash and heard voices crying out. Jamming on her brakes she jumped off; looked back up the precipitous path; saw nothing but its windings. She left her bicycle at the path's side and turned and ran up. Rounding a sharp bend, she saw them at last above her; Barry and Kay scrambling furiously down the side of the cliff, and below them, on a ledge half-way down to the sea, a tangled heap that was Gerda and her bicycle.

The next turn of the path hid them from sight again. But in two minutes she had reached the place where their two bicycles lay flung across the path, and was scrambling after them down the cliff.

When she reached them they had disentangled Gerda and the bicycle, and Barry held Gerda in his arms. She was unconscious, and a cut in her head was bleeding, darkening her yellow hair, trickling over her colourless face. Her right leg and her left arm lay stiff and oddly twisted.

Barry, his face drawn and tense, said "We must get her up to the path before she comes to, if possible. It'll hurt like h.e.l.l if she's conscious."

They had all learnt how to help their fellow creatures in distress, and how you must bind broken limbs to splints before you move their owner so much as a yard. The only splint available for Gerda's right leg was her left, and they bound it tightly to this with three handkerchiefs, then tied her left arm to her side with Nan's stockings, and used the fourth handkerchief (which was Gerda's, and the cleanest) for her head. She came to before the arm was finished, roused to pained consciousness by the splinting process, and lay with clenched teeth and wet forehead, breathing sharply but making no other sound.

Then Barry lifted her in his arms and the others supported her on either side, and they climbed slowly and gently up to the path, not by the sheer way of their descent but by a diagonal track that joined the path further down.

"I'm sorry, darling," Barry said through his teeth when he jolted her.

"I'm frightfully sorry.... Only a little more now."

They reached the path and Barry laid her down on the gra.s.s by its side, her head supported on Nan's knee.

"Very bad, isn't it?" said Barry gently, bending over her.

She smiled up at him, with twisted lips.

"Not so bad, really."

"You little sportsman," said Barry, softly and stooping, he kissed her pale cheek.

Then he stood up and spoke to Nan.

"I'm going to fetch a doctor if there's one in Talland. Kay must ride back and fetch the Polperro doctor, in case there isn't. In any case I shall bring up help and a stretcher from Talland and have her taken down."

He picked up his bicycle and stood for a moment looking down at the face on Nan's knee.

"You'll look after her," he said, quickly, and got on the bicycle and dashed down the path, showing that he too could do that fool's trick if it served any good purpose.

Gerda, watching him, caught her breath and forgot pain in fear until, swerving round the next bend, he was out of sight.

9

Nan sat very still by the path, staring over the sea, shading Gerda's head from the sun. There was nothing more to be done than that; there was no water, even, to bathe the cut with.

"Nan."

"Yes?"

"Am I much hurt? How much hurt, do you think?"

"I don't know how much. I think the arm is broken. The leg may be only sprained. Then there's the cut--I daresay that isn't very much--but one can't tell that."

"I must have come an awful mucker," Gerda murmured, after a pause. "It must have looked silly, charging over the edge like that.... You didn't."

"No. I didn't."

"It was stupid," Gerda breathed, and shut her eyes.

"No, not stupid. Anyone might have. It was a risky game to try."

"You tried it."

"Oh, I ... I do try things. That's no reason why you should.... You'd better not talk. Lie quite quiet. It won't be very long now before they come.... The pain's bad, I know."

Gerda's head was hot and felt giddy. She moved it restlessly. Urgent thoughts pestered her; her normal reticences lay like broken fences about her.