It started to rain on the morning of the meeting—those big, warm drops that fall in summer and drain the air or breath. From every street and alley in Star Harbour the water flowed downwards towards the docks. The trees drooped and on the ground the slugs came out to bloat their bodies with moisture. In bad weather such as this the scouts met in an empty gym which served at night as a sort of men’s club. Here the scouts would spend the afternoon playing games, practicing their lore, and trying to look easy in their uniforms.

Stevens drove through the boathouse gate a little before three. Jeremy let him in, standing quietly in the rain while the car passed. Stevens saluted Jeremy with his hand, but the caretaker made no response. This was the sort of thing that happened to Stevens sometimes, and so now he tried to pretend that he had merely been smoothing his hair with his palm. He stopped in front of the house and blew his horn. Ronny emerged at once, clad in tight shorts which almost cut his upper thigh and with a woman’s red silk scarf around his neck.

“Do I look like a scout?” he demanded in his shrill voice. “Do I?”

Something tense in his expression made Stevens say quickly as he opened the door beside him: “Don’t worry, no one will care. You’ll have fun, wait and see if you don’t.”

“I’ve had these shorts for three years,” said Ronny. “They used to come all the way to my knees.”

“They look fine.” It made Stevens happy to be reassuring Ronny, to be handling him at last in a real, authoritative way.

Ronny leaned forward to wave to Jeremy at the gate. “Goodbye, Jeremy. So long.” After a moment the boy spoke again without taking his eyes from the window: “Say, Mr. Stevens, we have to go to the Greys and get June.”

“June!” exclaimed Stevens. “Really Ronny, you know these scout meetings are only for boys!”

“Oh she won’t come there,” said Ronny. “But her grandmother has some errands she wants done or something, so June can come and then go back when I do.”

Stevens could not go against Mrs. Grey and with grating nerves he drove up the hill to where June was already on the porch stoop.

Holding a broken lamp in her hand, June looked today, with her locks of hair, her shirt open at the throat, like an archangel slightly out of drawing. She came down the steps and Stevens, piercing her with his cold, grey glance, reached behind Ronny and opened the rear door for her without a word. June climbed in rather clumsily, and just as Stevens pressed the starter he saw Mrs. Grey standing inside the open front door. The schoolmaster flushed. He felt that in his curtness, the rudeness of making the young girl sit alone in back, he had given himself away. Surely Mrs. Grey had noticed and was now judging him wryly, with an austere tolerance that made him squirm.

All three of them were silent as they skirted the water and drove off the peninsula. Presently, along the road’s edge, the houses gathered nearer one another and turned the highway into Main Street. Stevens had meant to point out his house to Ronny as they passed it. Now with the girl in the car this pleasure was denied him. Also he found as he flicked his eyes sideways that the contours of his home displeased him. Under the rain it looked fussy and dark. He was ashamed, too, of the stones bordering the short drive. He had whitewashed them a few days ago. Now he hoped the rain would soon cleanse them. Was he never to rid himself, he wondered irritably, of these small-town tastes? The windshield in front of him clicked back and forth as though giving a negative answer.

Presently they reached the center of Star Harbour and turned down a side street to stop in front of a dingy building. A few boys dressed in scout shorts and neckerchiefs were on their way in.

“Be back here in two hours if you want a ride home,” said Stevens to June.

“Yes sir,” said June, and Stevens could not tell if the ‘sir’ was in earnest or if there had been a hint of mockery in her tone. He was angry because despite himself the address pleased him.

“Did you hear, she called you sir!” said Ronny. “Rise, Sir Stevens, I have dubbed thee knight!” Now the boy’s voice was filled with an emotion which Stevens could not define. Nudging him to make him get out of the car, Stevens felt that the boy’s hand was icy cold.

‘He’s afraid!’ thought Stevens.

Stevens was right. Ronny was afraid of the boys he was to meet. Nervousness and fear made his fingers clammy and vague cramps squeezed his bowels as he tried to picture the games they would play. They had grown worse when he had been able to compare the real scout costume to his own. He dragged himself out of the car. June was already on the sidewalk, looking at the lamp she held with one of those vague, slightly surprised expressions that young people wear when they have been given something to do for their elders. Now that she was in the village, she could not imagine why she had come or what she would do with two whole hours. The rain fell upon her head in great drops and wet her white shirt. She started forlornly up the street and Ronny, although acutely aware of her going, bade her no word of adieu. To him, her aimless walk beneath the rain, her seeming lack of destination, was a freedom to be envied. She was not forced to enter into that drab building and to meet a score of unknown monsters.

Stevens said: “Come along, old boy. You’ll like them you know, and they’ll like you. Besides, we’re going to play touch football. I’m sure you’re good at it.”

Immediately the picture of two boys rose up in front of Ronny’s eyes: team captains choosing sides. They cracked names out of their mouths like bullets and, as they spoke, boy after boy detached himself proudly from the mass to stand with his team. Finally only one boy was left, alone and ridiculous in childish, striped shorts and his mother’s old silk scarf around his neck.

They were inside the building now and from a large double door in front of them could be heard the joyous noises of the scouts at play. There was something repulsive to Ronny about that door. Its cheap wood, cheaply varnished and marred with a thousand scratches, spoke of the monotony of groups, of clubs, of the same sex gathered together with enforced gaiety and enforced rules.

Ronny, who was advancing with Stevens’ hand across his shoulder suddenly gulped, ducked, and ran out of the building as quickly as a fox. His voice floated back to the astonished scout master:

“Be back in two hours—sir.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

Star Harbour’s gift shop, run by Lucy Philmore, was a hodgepodge of the useful and ornamental. One could get almost anything one wanted here: chinaware, toys, cards, lamps, even dresses. Lucy was more like a hostess than a shopkeeper as she presided with a cheerful, pleasant manner.

When June came in that afternoon, Lucy greeted her kindly. She inquired after her health and the health of her grandmother and asked how June had liked the various presents sent up from the gift shop during her illness. It was Lucy who had chosen them for friends of the Greys. June thanked her and said she had enjoyed them all. In doing so and remembering the gifts, a flavour of her sickness returned to her. For an instant she recalled how it had felt to be lying there in bed.

“Do you know,” she said, “I can hardly picture being sick anymore. It’s as though it was someone else.”

“Yes, things change when you are growing up,” agreed Lucy sympathetically. “You are really a young lady now.”

‘I wonder if I feel like one?’ thought June as she smiled politely at Lucy. That was the trouble about not seeing other girls for such ages.

“I hear you are being tutored too,” said Lucy. “By Mr. Stevens. That must be very nice for you.”

“Nice!” June was intrigued at this way of putting it.

“Well, Mr. Stevens is such an intelligent and cultivated person,” explained Lucy. “You must have wonderful discussions about your studies.” Her voice now sounded wistful. She would have given a lot to be in June’s shoes.

“Do you know him well?” asked June, who was always surprised when people knew each other.

Lucy’s cheeks grew a little pink. “Not very,” she replied. “That is, until lately. But we are neighbours.” Envy was a bad emotion she knew, yet she could not help envying June a little. Oh to have all in front of one again, to await sincerely the changes to come, changes other than the gradual settling of middle age. Even the secret hope inside her own breast was, thought Lucy, a feeble flame. The least wind would blow it out. She looked over June’s head at the rainy street and gave one of those deep breaths that are not quite sighs.

“Mr. Stevens doesn’t get along with me very well,” said June, “or I don’t get along with him.”

June herself was now gazing at the door. She was depressed by Miss Philmore’s empty cordiality. It emphasized a gulf she had lately begun to notice, an untraversable space between human beings. “Oh,” she exclaimed suddenly, “there’s Ronny!” Without a word more she hurried out of the shop.

Ronny was walking along purposefully, his rope-soled shoes leaving straight prints behind him on the wet sidewalk. His hands thrust into the pockets of his shorts made them tighter than ever around his sinewy thighs.

“Ronny!” cried June, catching up with him. “Why aren’t you at the scout meeting?”

“I decided not to go,” said Ronny, putting down his head to avoid her eye.

“What did James Stevens say?”

Ronny did not answer her. Instead he asked: “Do you know where I’m going now?” He did not wait but answered himself: “I’m going to the docks.” He glanced at her doubtfully. “I suppose you could come,” he said, “but it’s not really for girls, not even grown-up girls.”

“How do you know?” asked June, smiling down at his dark, wet, unruly head which came up to her shoulder.

“I just know,” he replied shrugging. “I sometimes just know things that nobody told me.” He slowed down a bit and turned towards her eagerly. “That’s why,” he said, making an effort to explain, “I often wonder—I mean about knights and all and Gambol and Shalimar. I couldn’t be making it all up, could I?”

The rain was falling hard now and had gradually lost its warmth but Ronny was oblivious to it. The drops lay for a moment unbroken on his upturned face and then ran down his cheeks and neck. They gave his skin a luster and tangled the hair across his brow. He moved his body impatiently. The real meaning had not come. It was still inside him. He tried it from another angle. “If I were a knight I couldn’t grow up,” he said, “could I? Not when you really think about it, but if I were to be a sailor, for instance, I could.”

“Yes,” said June, “although of course there’s no comparison. A knight is more glorious.”

“That’s just what you would say,” Ronny took her hand. “No one else but you. James Stevens would call it unhealthy, wouldn’t he?” Ronny was silent a moment and then exclaimed: “Shalimar is more glorious than all the scouts. I know he is. I know, I know.”

They were both soaked to the skin by now as they walked down the sloping street which led to the harbour. Here the aspect of the town changed. There were warehouses, in between which were rows of broken down little shacks like teeth in a beggar’s mouth. These were the slums of Star Harbour and inhabited mostly by Negroes. Dark faces looked out at them from the darker doorways and sometimes a snatch of strangely rhythmed song came to their ears.

Once an old woman staggered drunkenly in their path. Her face was so wrinkled and discoloured that it was impossible to tell her race. She stopped as they approached and with a grimace at Ronny pulled open the ragged, torn top of her blouse. One of her breasts leapt out at them like an animal; perfectly formed, pointed and white as milk. Her eyes leered into Ronny’s, and in their wake her laughter was as harsh as weeping.

Ahead the dock stretched out over the water. Here fishing boats were being unloaded by men in thigh-length boots, while other men were shoveling oystershells into a truck from a huge, gleaming pile. Even in the rain a constant, important activity went on. It was the open gate to all the world. June and Ronny, standing side by side on the dock, felt a free salt breath enter their lungs and quicken their blood. The vast, unnamed possibilities of life made them smile. They were not afraid of destiny. Destiny was this rain-swept sea, these boats coming and going, and the far-off, nostalgic horizon.

There was a hiss. June felt a blow across her arm and shoulder, while at the same time an angry voice cried: “Look out there!” She had been struck by a painter thrown up to the dock from a boat, and she sprang back, more embarrassed than smarting.