(Certainly, Nancy had gone with them, since Minta Doyle had asked it
with her dumb look, holding out her hand, as Nancy made off, after
lunch, to her attic, to escape the horror of family life. She supposed she
must go then. She did not want to go. She did not want to be drawn into
it all. For as they walked along the road to the cliff Minta kept on taking
her hand. Then she would let it go. Then she would take it again. What
was it she wanted? Nancy asked herself. There was something, of course,
that people wanted; for when Minta took her hand and held it, Nancy,
reluctantly, saw the whole world spread out beneath her, as if it were
Constantinople seen through a mist, and then, however heavy-eyed one
might be, one must needs ask, "Is that Santa Sofia?" "Is that the Golden
Horn?" So Nancy asked, when Minta took her hand. "What is it that she
wants? Is it that?" And what was that? Here and there emerged from the
mist (as Nancy looked down upon life spread beneath her) a pinnacle, a
dome; prominent things, without names. But when Minta dropped her
hand, as she did when they ran down the hillside, all that, the dome, the
pinnacle, whatever it was that had protruded through the mist, sank
down into it and disappeared. Minta, Andrew observed, was rather a
good walker. She wore more sensible clothes that most women. She
wore very short skirts and black knickerbockers. She would jump
straight into a stream and flounder across. He liked her rashness, but he
saw that it would not do—she would kill herself in some idiotic way one
of these days. She seemed to be afraid of nothing—except bulls. At the
mere sight of a bull in a field she would throw up her arms and fly
screaming, which was the very thing to enrage a bull of course. But she
did not mind owning up to it in the least; one must admit that. She knew
she was an awful coward about bulls, she said. She thought she must
have been tossed in her perambulator when she was a baby. She didn't
seem to mind what she said or did. Suddenly now she pitched down on
the edge of the cliff and began to sing some song about
Damn your eyes, damn your eyes.
They all had to join in and sing the chorus, and shout out together:
62
Damn your eyes, damn your eyes,
but it would be fatal to let the tide come in and cover up all the good
hunting-grounds before they got on to the beach.
"Fatal," Paul agreed, springing up, and as they went slithering down,
he kept quoting the guide-book about "these islands being justly celebrated
for their park-like prospects and the extent and variety of their
marine curiosities." But it would not do altogether, this shouting and
damning your eyes, Andrew felt, picking his way down the cliff, this
clapping him on the back, and calling him "old fellow" and all that; it
would not altogether do. It was the worst of taking women on walks.
Once on the beach they separated, he going out on to the Pope's Nose,
taking his shoes off, and rolling his socks in them and letting that couple
look after themselves; Nancy waded out to her own rocks and searched
her own pools and let that couple look after themselves. She crouched
low down and touched the smooth rubber-like sea anemones, who were
stuck like lumps of jelly to the side of the rock. Brooding, she changed
the pool into the sea, and made the minnows into sharks and whales,
and cast vast clouds over this tiny world by holding her hand against the
sun, and so brought darkness and desolation, like God himself, to millions
of ignorant and innocent creatures, and then took her hand away
suddenly and let the sun stream down. Out on the pale criss-crossed
sand, high-stepping, fringed, gauntleted, stalked some fantastic leviathan
(she was still enlarging the pool), and slipped into the vast fissures of
the mountain side. And then, letting her eyes slide imperceptibly above
the pool and rest on that wavering line of sea and sky, on the tree trunks
which the smoke of steamers made waver on the horizon, she became
with all that power sweeping savagely in and inevitably withdrawing,
hypnotised, and the two senses of that vastness and this tininess (the
pool had diminished again) flowering within it made her feel that she
was bound hand and foot and unable to move by the intensity of feelings
which reduced her own body, her own life, and the lives of all the people
in the world, for ever, to nothingness. So listening to the waves, crouching
over the pool, she brooded.
