Uncharted Seas by Dennis Wheatley

to Coventry,’ she opened up quite calmly as she sat down on the bottom boards beside him.
    ‘Well, more or less,’ he admitted. ‘I didn’t think my society would be particularly welcome in the stern after—’
    ‘You needn’t have,’ she cut in, ‘at least as far as I’m concerned. I can quite understand the temptation to have a go at that rum proving too much for you.’
    ‘Thanks,’ his voice was bitter. ‘In that case it would be kinder if you refrained from heaping coals of fire on my unworthy head.’
    ‘But I mean it,’ she protested, ‘and seeing you look so miserable I wanted you to know that I
do
understand how a person can want a thing most terribly and decide to take it even when they shouldn’t.’
    ‘Do you?’ Basil raised his eyebrows. ‘Really?, Well, it was an appalling weakness on my part, anyhow.’
    ‘Of course, but we all give way to things at times.’
    ‘I suppose we do, but it isn’t everybody who’ll admit it.’
    ‘Perhaps, but it happens that I remember just what the after-effects are like.’
    To his amazement he caught a sudden twinkle in her grey eyes as he murmured, ‘I’m afraid I don’t quite understand.’
    ‘How should you? But we can speak frankly now. I mean, there doesn’t seem to be much chance of our being picked up alive, does there?’
    ‘To be honest, no.’
    ‘And one’s done so many stupid, harmful things; and left undone so many decent things. Though it sounds pretty sloppy put that way.’
    ‘It’s true all the same,’ Basil agreed, shooting a quick glance at the face of the girl beside him. He hesitated a second then, on a sudden impulse, pulled out the notebook in which he had been writing. ‘Queer you should say that. It’s just what I’ve been thinking all the afternoon. Care to look at a whine that might be entitled “Lost Opportunities”?’
    She took the open book and read the pencilled scrawl:
    Our days have been the bones of nothingness
dressed in a scarecrow dress of patchworked tatters;
we tore up all our nights in restlessness,
filled them with the dropping spindles of our chatter;
our lives are the aimless turning of broken looms,
the rustling of beetles’ wings in empty rooms
.
    Faces have mocked us down our broken ways,
the backless masks of our bent chivalries
as empty as the rent cloak of our days;
flame-like, the clearness of their lips’ dead laughter
came after us, speaking of bittered memories
which had belonged to us, life’s mercenaries
.
    And yet we could have torn the world apart
if we had loved; we could have rolled the days
back on the nights, lived in another’s heart,
and shod our lips with laughter caught amazed
on the sudden quivering of another’s smile;
…
or, as at Troy, have thrown a wave of spears
crescendo-ed in silver against the walls of years
.
    We could have taught this other, had we won
our way to her, the woven, darling rhyme
which bound our ways together
—
then undone
our days and slipped them from the leash of time
.
    …
But these are fantasies
Maimed by the masks of our lost opportunities
.
    ‘Thank you,’ she said slowly. ‘That is very beautiful and it was kind of you to show it to me. I had no idea you—well, were the sort of person who had those sort of thoughts, or such a wonderful gift for expressing them.’
    ‘I don’t, often—have those sort of thoughts, I mean. You’d hate most of the things I jot down at odd moments. Still, there’s some good in the worst of us and a streak of bad in the best of us, I suppose, as the old cliché has it.’
    ‘Of course there is.’ Unity’s grey eyes held his steadily. ‘I never meant to speak of it again until I saw you looking so miserable; but I thought it might make you feel less bad to hear about my frightful lapse from virtue. I was in Selfridges one morning and I saw a lovely fur. It wasn’t particularly big or valuable, but I couldn’t possibly afford to buy it and quite suddenly I wanted that fur more than anything