As it must, he told himself. This could not last for ever. And sometimes he found himself trying to imagine how it would end. To-night he was preoccupied with the discovery that each day, as the end approached, he was dreading it more and more. He had tried to explain this to her as they walked in the garden under the cypresses and looked across the dark waters of the Gulf, and she had smiled and said: "Ah, yes!" She was still a mystery to him, and that was another grief, since he did not yet suspect that the mystery of a woman is simply a screen with nothing behind it. She smiled in her alluring inscrutable way and he held her desperately to him, wondering in what form the fate of their separation would appear.
And when he saw that she had not come down to the jetty to meet him, as she had done on previous nights, he instantly accepted her absence as a signal of change. Yet at the back of his mind there burned a thin bright flame of intelligence that told him the truth. Evanthia had that supreme virtue of the courageous--her dissimulation was neither clumsy nor cruel. It was as much a part of her as was her skin, her hair, her amber eyes. He knew in his heart this was so and made of it a rack on which he tortured himself with thoughts of her fidelity. Each day the difference between this experience and the shallow clap-trap intrigues he had known became more marked to him. The thought of her out there, hidden away from other men, with her delicious graces of body and lucidity of mind, for him alone, was almost too poignant for him. As he came alongside the little staging, and made fast, he returned again to the foreboding thought of the day. There would come an end. And beyond the end of this he could see nothing but darkness, nothing save an aching void.
Nevertheless, as he came up from the jetty and stood for a moment in the road which followed the curve of the shore, and listened to the sounds of the village that nestled in the valley like a few grains of light in a great bowl of darkness, he was conscious of something which he could not successfully analyze or separate from his tumultuous emotions. He put it to himself, crudely enough, when he muttered: "I shall have to take a hand." He was discovering himself in the act of submitting once more to outside authority. Looking back over his life, he saw that as his hitherto invincible habit of mind. He saw himself turning round to call the captain. And now he was the captain. And Evanthia's enigmatic gaze was perhaps the expression of her curiosity. She was above all things in the world, stimulating. He found himself invigorated to an extraordinary degree by his intimacy with that resourceful, courageous, and lovable being, who would never speak of the future, waving it away with a flick of her adorable hand and looking at him for an instant with an intent, unfathomable stare. And as he started to climb the hillside, setting the loose stones rolling in the gullies and rousing a dog to give forth a series of deep ringing notes like a distant gong, he saw that the initiative rested with himself. He would have to take a hand. It would not do for him to imagine they could remain like this in almost idyllic felicity. The ship would be unloaded in a week or so and nothing would remain but to let the water into her after-hold and sink her, according to the commandant's orders, in the fair way. But he could not let himself sink back into a slothful obscurity. He had no interior resources beyond his almost desperate passion for this girl who seemed to accept him as an inevitable yet transient factor in her destiny, a girl who conveyed to him in subtle nuances a chaotic impression of sturdy fidelity and bizarre adventurousness. That was one of the secrets of her personality--the maintenance of their relations upon a plane above the filth and languor of the flesh, yet unsupported by the conventional props of tradition and honour. For she had so just a knowledge of the functions and possibilities of love in human life that he could never presume upon the absence of those props. It amazed him beyond his available powers of expression, that in giving him herself she gave more than he had ever imagined. She had given him an enormously expanded comprehension of character, an insight into the secrets of his own heart. And it was, perhaps, this new knowledge of what he himself might do, that was impelling him to "take a hand." When he reached the gate set in the wall of the garden, he had decided to take a hand at once. He had a plan.