And, it blazed upon me, I might have died there by the sheer ebbing of my will—­unavenged!

In another moment I was running and stumbling, revolver in hand, in quiet unsuspected pursuit of them, through the soft and noiseless sand.

Section 5

I came up over the little ridge and discovered the bungalow village I had been seeking, nestling in a crescent lap of dunes.  A door slammed, the two runners had vanished, and I halted staring.

There was a group of three bungalows nearer to me than the others.  Into one of these three they had gone, and I was too late to see which.  All had doors and windows carelessly open, and none showed a light.

This place, upon which I had at last happened, was a fruit of the reaction of artistic-minded and carelessly living people against the costly and uncomfortable social stiffness of the more formal seaside resorts of that time.  It was, you must understand, the custom of the steam-railway companies to sell their carriages after they had been obsolete for a sufficient length of years, and some genius had hit upon the possibility of turning these into little habitable cabins for the summer holiday.  The thing had become a fashion with a certain Bohemian-spirited class; they added cabin to cabin, and these little improvised homes, gaily painted and with broad verandas and supplementary leantos added to their accommodation, made the brightest contrast conceivable to the dull rigidities of the decorous resorts.  Of course there were many discomforts in such camping that had to be faced cheerfully, and so this broad sandy beach was sacred to high spirits and the young.  Art muslin and banjoes, Chinese lanterns and frying, are leading “notes,” I find, in the impression of those who once knew such places well.  But so far as I was concerned this odd settlement of pleasure-squatters was a mystery as well as a surprise, enhanced rather than mitigated by an imaginative suggestion or so I had received from the wooden-legged man at Shaphambury.  I saw the thing as no gathering of light hearts and gay idleness, but grimly—­after the manner of poor men poisoned by the suppression of all their cravings after joy.  To the poor man, to the grimy workers, beauty and cleanness were absolutely denied; out of a life of greasy dirt, of muddied desires, they watched their happier fellows with a bitter envy and foul, tormenting suspicions.  Fancy a world in which the common people held love to be a sort of beastliness, own sister to being drunk! . . .

There was in the old time always something cruel at the bottom of this business of sexual love.  At least that is the impression I have brought with me across the gulf of the great Change.  To succeed in love seemed such triumph as no other success could give, but to fail was as if one was tainted. . . .