CHAPTER VI.
Manly was en fête. A surf carnival was in progress, and the prettiest seaside resort south of the equator was thronged with a typical, good-natured, pleasure-loving Australian crowd.
Stalwart young sons of the surf, burned to the shade of South Sea Kanakas, strolled about the corso in duck shorts and tennis shirts, bareheaded and barefooted, looking incongruous, but quite at ease among the faultlessly dressed women who often accompanied them.
Sprague wandered aimlessly through the throng, unconsciously noting, as an observant man will, many things that might or might not be of use to him in the future.
Robert trotted placidly at his heels, seemingly quite contented with his restricted outlook on a forest of legs and skirts, each with its distinctive odor that so effectually distinguished it from the one being in his world—his master. But presently a familiar scent assailed his nostrils, and his tail wagged him to the side of a large red touring car standing at the curb. In it sat an immaculately dressed young lady, who leaned over the door with surprising quickness and hoisted him bodily to her lap. Robert's greeting was effusive, but tinged with guilt. While he wriggled with pleasure and spasmodically licked the empty air, his eyes followed his retreating master.
“You don't want him,” said the girl.
For answer the dog nearly leaped from her arms.
“So do I,” she whispered in his left ear. “He'll come back.”
And he did.
“I didn't recognize you,” he said, lifting his battered panama.
“But Rags did,” said the girl.
“You're honored,” said Sprague. “Robert”—with emphasis on the word—“has never done that before.”
“Rags didn't do it,” Meg confessed; “I did it.”
They smiled at one another over the car door.
Sprague had seen nothing of her for over a week, and she had never entered his thoughts during that time—the work was far too engrossing to allow of trivialities; but now he was conscious of a very keen delight at seeing her again. She had changed, he told himself; and the next moment was inwardly amused at the obviousness of the discovery. Of course she had changed; he had never seen her fully dressed before; but, no, he decided on second inspection that that was not the only difference
“I wonder why you didn't recognize me?” she was saying.
“There's such a crowd,” said Sprague vaguely; “and, then, I think I missed the blue kimono,” he added, smiling.
“How do you like the disguise?”
Meg held her arms wide for inspection, and Sprague studied her gravely.
“Not as much as the original,” he said.
Her hands fell to the cushions, and a queer little laugh escaped her. Then suddenly she leaned over the side of the car.
“Neither do I!” she hissed.
But Sprague was too thunderstruck to make answer, for the movement had shown him that there was paint on her face!
She moved uneasily on the cushions, and cast a furtive glance up the crowded corso.
“Frank—Mr. Walker—will be back in a minute” Her voice trailed off into the hubbub about them as she caught sight of an ample figure hurrying through the crowd. A frown puckered her forehead, and the next moment she had opened and shut the car door and stood on the pavement at Sprague's side.
“Where?” he demanded, with a quick flash of intuition vouchsafed to some men as well as women.
“Anywhere!” she answered; and they ran, leaving in their wake laughter, indignant glances, or expostulations, according to the temperaments of the people they jostled in their flight, until the blue Pacific brought them to a standstill.
“I've got a canoe beached beyond the pavilion,” Sprague announced.
It sounded like a schoolboy plotting mischief, and Meg laughed in sheer delight as she gathered her white skirts about her and stumbled through the sand at his side.
He launched the canoe, and stood steadying it, knee-deep in the water.
“You'll ruin your dress,” he suggested, with a broad smile; and if any further incentive were needed, this clinched the matter. Meg clambered in, and, seizing a paddle, knelt native fashion in a couple of inches of water.
The surf was running high, and more than once it seemed that the frail craft must surely be caught and crumpled like paper; but, with careful manipulation, the waves were met bow on, and presently it emerged beyond the breakers, carrying a foot of water and its drenched, but laughing, crew.
The girl's hat, a one-time dainty confection of white straw and paisley silk, hung, dripping, about her face; and she rubbed her cheeks vigorously with the salt water it supplied while Sprague was bailing with a marmalade tin.
Presently he looked up, and became instantly engrossed in the progress of the carnival.
“We can see splendidly from here,” he said eagerly. “What on earth are they doing?”
Meg's eyes sparkled with excitement.
“Ah,” she said, “we don't get first-night plays, but we do have surf carnivals. That's the landing of Captain Cook. Look—there's his sloop, and there he is in the whaleboat going ashore. Those are the aboriginals—see them squatting in semicircles on the sand?”
A gunshot boomed from the sloop anchored beyond the breakers, and echoed up the cliffs beyond the beach.
“There! He's landed, and the natives are friendly. They were at first, you know, but afterward they came out in canoes at night and attacked them. They're having a corroboree now. Look! That man striped like a zebra is a chief; he leads them. See, now they're off!”
Along the glistening beach the strange procession wound its way—capering aboriginals, wildly waving clubs and boomerangs; less demonstrative sailors from the sloop; and finally the sedate figure of Captain Cook in full uniform, all receiving a deafening ovation from the crowds that lined the corso,
“It's better than last year,” said Meg. “They had Venus rising from the sea then. I knew the girl who did Venus, and she said it was awful; something went wrong, and she was nearly drowned; but they told her she must go through with it or spoil the whole procession, so she was carried out of the water, half fainting, and plumped into the huge shell on wheels that was waiting on the beach, and dragged the whole length of the corso, trying to smile. Every one said she looked so pale and pretty—oh, look! They're shooting the breakers!”
And, sure enough, they were. Captain Cook and his coterie had hardly disappeared when a score of young men dashed down the beach and plunged headlong into the surf. Through an endless succession of foam-capped waves they dived, like a school of playful porpoises, until they were some two hundred yards from the beach; then, taking advantage of a momentary lull, they waited, treading water and watching for a suitable wave. It was not long in coming. A gigantic, foam-crested roller seethed toward them, and at a given signal they rose halfway to its summit and shot down its endless, emerald-green side, headlong, for shore.
It was not the first time that Sprague had seen this done, and it fascinated him.
“I'd give a year of my life to be able to do it,” he said.
Meg regarded him with frank wonderment.
“You've been everywhere,” she said, “and done everything, and can't shoot the breakers?”
“I'm afraid so,” he sighed.
“Then I'll teach you,” she cried.
“When—where?”
“Now—at the cove.”
It seemed quite in keeping with the madness of the moment, and Sprague was forced to paddle like one possessed to keep the canoe's bow from edging his way under the strength of the girl's strokes.
The canoe had hardly touched the sandy beach of the cove when Meg leaped from it.
“Shan't be a minute,” her shoulder, and scrambled up the cliff track.
Sprague's bathing costume was in the bottom of the canoe, wet and uninviting, but he was ready when Meg returned in the familiar blue kimono, swinging a billy can and humming a little tune of her own.
“Thought we might have some tea,” she explained. “But first of all—come along!” And, throwing the kimono from her, she ran down to the sea.
The lesson in breaker shooting was a strictly serious business, and not the unadulterated joy Sprague had expected. It appeared that the chief feature of the art lay in selecting a suitable wave, and this was not as easy as it appeared. Moreover, it necessitated allowing an indefinite number to pass over one's head before the right one presented itself.
“Throw all your weight forward,” Meg ordered for the third time. “Hunch your shoulders a little—keep your head down; it gives more for the wave to grip—there—so—now”
Sprague blindly obeyed, and—at last! He found himself cradled in foam, gliding swiftly and ever faster, with the music of rushing waters in his ears. The sensation was like nothing he had ever experienced. It seemed, during those brief moments, that it must be a glorious thing to drown.
The wave carried him into shallow water, and he was brought back to things practical by a rippling laugh.
“You did it!” cried Meg. “You really did it!”
“Yes, I did it,” grinned Sprague triumphantly.
“And you've earned tea. Come along.”
Under their joint administration, the billy was soon boiling, and they drank in turn tea that to Sprague had never tasted so good.
During all that golden afternoon they had avoided any reference to their harebrained flight. They had accepted the strangely vivid pleasure of their meeting as a thing too blessed to analyze—a holiday snatched from convention and held immune from consideration of cause and effect. But now, in the solitude of the cove, with nothing to distract their attention, a silence fell between them that, in the subtle way of silences, seemed to demand an encroachment on forbidden ground, and Meg was the first to make it.
“I've been correct for a whole week,” she said suddenly. “This is the reaction.” She leaned back on the sand with a little sigh of content. “If you only knew the relief!”
Sprague studied her gravely.
“I can quite imagine it,” he said. “I like the reaction.”
“So you said before. It's rather a pity, because father, Frank, and the boarder like the other best.”
“The boarder!”
“Oh, of course, I forgot, you don't deal in gossip—we've got a boarder.”
“Really! Star or otherwise?”
“Very much star. She wears clingy clothes and smokes.”
Sprague sat upright in the sand.
“You don't say!” he breathed. “And Mrs. Adams”
Meg took time to wriggle into a position seemingly more consistent with the dignity of her news. Sprague set traps for, and reveled in, these remnants of her childhood.
“Mrs. Adams says” she began.
“Of course she does,” he broke in indignantly. “The idea!” But there he stopped. The girl had turned from him, and sat staring out to sea with a little frown.
“What does she say?” he queried.
But there was no response.
“Please!” he pleaded.
“You're laughing at me,” she said quietly. “I believe you're always laughing at me.”
The woman in Meg had a habit of supplanting the child with disconcerting abruptness. Sprague was witnessing the rather bewildering process for the second time.
“I'm not,” he protested; “indeed, I'm not. Surely you don't class yourself with Mrs. Adams?”
“There are no classes in Australia,” she answered.
"Oh, that won't do!” laughed Sprague. “There are class distinctions in London, and in the Cannibal Islands, and they're nowhere more marked than in countries that think here they have none.”
Apparently this failed to convince. Meg still looked out to sea.
“I suppose we are funny,” she mused. “She thinks so, too—the star boarder; you can see the laughter behind her eyes when she talks to you. She seems to be saying 'What a queer little colonial worm!' I hate her!”
Sprague seldom improved an occasion, but there was genuine trouble in the girl's eyes.
“You shouldn't hate,” he said gently; “it's hardly ever worth while, and such an uncomfortable state of mind for a healthy being. Just laugh back.”
“I can't,” said Meg; “there's nothing to laugh at.”
“Avoid talking to her, then.”
“How can I when we live in the same house? She's our guest, although she's a paying one. Besides, she won't be avoided; she's tremendously friendly—or pretends to be.”
A sudden thought flashed into Sprague's brain.
“She painted your face,” he said.
An answering flush mounted to Meg's cheeks.
“I didn't think you noticed,” she said.
“Noticed! After Spokane, I believe I can smell the stuff!”
“It was an experiment. She said everybody does it, and it makes such a difference.”
Sprague emitted a sound usually described as “Pshaw!” although it is nothing like it, and flung a pebble into the sea with unnecessary force.
“It does,” he said emphatically. “Of course,” he added, after a pause, “you can always kick her out. 'Ask for her room,' I believe is the right term.”
“She's paying two pounds a week,” said Meg thoughtfully. “I wonder what she is?”
Her hearer preserved a discreet silence.
“She's very anxious to meet you,” she added presently.
Sprague was lying face downward on the sand, and out of the corner of her eye Meg saw his body stiffen perceptibly.
“See me?”
The girl's lips were slightly compressed; the flush still lingered on her face.
“Yes; she made me promise to take her to the Haven.”
Sprague wriggled into a sitting posture, consternation written in every line of his sunburned face. Meg nodded her head dubiously.
“I told them,” she said. “I just had to, or burst.”
“Told them what?”
“About the—the work.”
She caught up a handful of sand, and spread it on her palm with a little finger; then flung it from her, and turned to him.
“It was at the kiosk,” she said deliberately. “She goes there every morning for bull's-eyes after bathing—she says that somehow bull's-eyes and bathing go together—and she was laughing with her eyes—while Mrs. Adams told her about your—your rehearsals; and I told them,” she ended defiantly. “Does it matter?”
Sprague considered a moment, then lay back on the sand and laughed.
“Not a bit,” he said; “but poor, dear Mrs. Adams! What will she do without her lunatic? And the star boarder—I suppose she laughed with something more than her eyes when you had finished?”
“No, she didn't laugh then; I think that's why she wants to come; she's tremendously interested.”
“Devilish good of her.”
“She said 'Show me your prodigy,' and gave me no peace until I promised to take her—to-morrow afternoon. I expect you'll like her. Dad does.”
“I dislike meeting strangers,” said Sprague, with emphasis.
“You didn't seem to mind me.”
He sighed wearily.
“Must I again propound that you are you, and I am I! The star boarder is quite another matter.”
A week ago Meg would have laughed at this. To-day she was silent. Sprague was silent, too.
“But you'll be at home?” said Meg presently.
Sprague scrambled to his feet.
“Oh, I'll be at home,” he said; “but the place is in a shocking state”—he shook his fist at her threateningly—“and after getting me into the soup, by Heaven, Meg, you'll have to help me out!”
It was the first time he had called her by that name, and, neatly as it had been done, it carried the same thrill that it has ever done to one who hears it uttered for the first time by those who count.
“I'll be there after lunch,” said Meg, without looking up.