ARY arranged her skirt carefully and sat down on a patch of heather at the edge of the cliff. She did not do this to admire the view, though it was a singularly fine view. She despised views, and thought them the perquisites of visitors, a despicable people.
The Cornish headland, bold and rough, stood out into the sea like some carved figurehead fronting a ship. Heather and bracken and gorse flamed to the land's edge, and the cliff, formed of black ironstone, dropped sheer into green waters.
Heather, sea, and clean, keen wind as sweet as wild honey were parts of Mary's existence. She never noticed them, because she had never been without them. She lived at Trelinnock, which has a population of one hundred and twenty people, sees a newspaper once a week, and generally has a post in the course of twenty-four hours unless there should be too heavy a gale blowing. Mary sat on the edge of the cliff because it was a quiet, place in which to think about David. David was also a part of Mary's existence, and it is not until things go wrong that you begin to think about your existence.
It was the close of a late-summer day. The light rested upon the world like a spell: it held the luminous, green edges of the sea, the single ghostlike spires of the ling, the robust, bright heather, Mary herself, in her twentieth year, burned brown by the sun, in a deep-golden glow.
Mary had never heard of Giorgione, but Giorgione would have known in a moment what to do with the glow. He would have made the color of it on Mary's heavy, brooding face shine through her flesh as light strikes through water. He would have got languor and pleasure and youth into Mary, and then he would have got the weight of a deep, mysterious sorrow, and with that he would have left her.
Mary sat quite still and gazed down into the green waters; she looked as if she were searching for something lost. But she did not see any green waters; she saw only David.
Mary was not one of those who wish the world to be wide. She wished it to be much narrower; she wanted it to hold only herself and David.
All Trelinnock had welcomed visitors except Mary; she had set her face against them from the first. Trelinnock had pandered to their strange tastes; it had sold picture post-cards to them, morbid in color and structurally impossible; it had put up bathing-tents on the strand, where rocks had always done; it had let lodgings, and given way to unnatural instincts for hot water at unreasonable hours.
In the first rush of their enthusiasm over these money-bringing hordes, the inhabitants of Trelinnock had even let out their boats to visitors who had thought they could sail boats, apparently under the impression that winds were malleable and could be kept quiet while one tried experiments; but this had proved expensive. Trelinnock winds blew where they listed and blew hard; boats were lost, and incidentally visitors (not enough of them, Mary thought) were lost with them. Boats at Trelinnock are more important than houses, and when visitors began losing boats, they were stopped hiring them without a fisherman. They could easily, if they wished to be drowned, bathe. A good many visitors were drowned all along the coast; they seemed to expect the sea to put itself out for them.
The sea behaved, just as Mary would have done in its place, precisely as it was accustomed to behave. When it had formed the habit of swirling round a rock with dangerous swiftness, it swirled round the rock, and if it carried some one out to sea with it who did n't know that where there is a swirl there is an undertow, that one was drowned (very rightly, Mary thought) for not knowing it. The natural laws were against visitors and on the side of Mary.
Mary's father had a small farm. A good deal of it was granite, but there was enough grass for half a dozen cows, and Mary was very knowing about all animals—cart-horses, cows, pigs, and poultry. She worked hard from early morning till the dews fell, but on Sundays she only fed the animals, went twice to church, and took a walk with David. The walk with David was also a religious institution. She had walked with him for four years; she would walk with him for another, and then she would marry him. She had meant to marry him all her life.
She was only six years old when the word "sweetheart," flung at her as a taunt, sank burning into the bottom of her heart. From the earliest years she and David had shared the same pools, the same rocks, the same punishments. The same waves wet the same portions of their persons insisted upon by parents as portions which must, in all circumstances, be kept dry. They went to the same school, and wept uncomprehendingly over the same sums.