The Blackbird’s Song
The destinies certainly did appear anxious to “square” him; for when that evening, after dinner with the Otters, he repaired to the Manor House with his packages, Mr. Urquhart turned out to be so delighted with the book, that he commissioned him to return to the bookseller the very next morning and make the old man a liberal offer.
Wolf awoke, therefore, on this day of Saturn, in that vague delicious mood wherein the sense of happiness-to-come seems, like a great melted pearl, to cover every immediate object and person with a liquid glamour.
He took his bath with unalloyed satisfaction between the four bare walls, whereon certain dimly outlined squares in the extended whiteness indicated the exile of all art except that of the air, the sun, and the wind.
He saw nothing of either of the brothers. Jason had not yet appeared; and though there had been some vague reference to his accompanying Darnley in his early start, it was now clear that the younger Otter wished his morning walk to be free of human intercourse.
This was all agreeable enough to Wolf, who, like most conspirators, had a furtive desire to be left to his own devices; and he resolved, without putting his resolution into any formal shape, that as soon as his business with Malakite was settled, he would make his way to the stonecutter’s yard.
From his conversation at breakfast with Mrs. Otter, he learnt that it was possible to reach the portion of the town where the bookseller lived without following the whole length of Chequers Street. This suited him well, as he wished to time his appearance at the Torp ménage so as to be certain of finding the girl at home.
He had discovered, laid carefully at the edge of his plate, a letter from his mother, and another letter, with a Ramsgard postmark, that he suspected to be from Selena Gault. Both these epistles he hurriedly thrust into his coat-pocket, afraid of any ill-omened sidetracking of his plans for that auspicious day.
It lacked about an hour of noon, when, armed with permission to bid as high as five pounds for the Evershot chronicle, Wolf entered for the second time the establishment of Mr. John Malakite.
The old man received him without the remotest trace of the emotion of the preceding day. He agreed so quickly to accept Mr. Urquhart’s offer, that Wolf felt a little ashamed of his own skill as a business intermediary. But he was glad to escape the tedium of haggling, and was preparing to bid the bookseller farewell, when the man asked in a blank and neutral voice, as if the proposal were a mechanical form of politeness, “Will you come upstairs with me, Mr. Solent, and have a glass of something?”
Knowing that there was no immediate hurry, if he were to time his visit to the Torps so as to catch them at their midday meal, Wolf assented to this suggestion, and, as on the former occasion, followed the man up the dark stairway with unquestioning docility.
He found Christie in a long blue apron, dusting the little sitting-room. Wolf was touched by the grave awkwardness with which she pulled this garment over her head and flung it down before offering him her hand. The dress she now appeared in was of a sombre brown, and so tightly fitting that it not only enhanced her slenderness, but also gave her an almost hieratic look. With her smoothly parted hair and abstracted brown eyes she resembled some withdrawn priestess of Artemis, interrupted in some sacred rite.
No sooner was the guest seated, than Mr. Malakite muttered some inarticulate apology and went down to his shop.
The girl stood for a while in silence, looking down upon her visitor, who returned her scrutiny without embarrassment. A delicious sense of age-long intimacy and ease flowed over him.
“Well, Mr. Solent,” she murmured, “I suppose you’re not going to leave Blacksod without seeing Gerda?”
“I thought of waiting till their dinnertime,” he said, “when I would be certain of finding her. Redfern’s headstone can be dragged in again as an excuse.”
Christie nodded gravely. “I wrote to her yesterday,” she said, “after you went. If I’d known you were coming in today I might have asked her to tea. But I daresay she’ll come anyway. She often does pay me visits.”
While the girl uttered these words, Wolf became aware for the first time of the extraordinary key in which her voice was pitched. It was a key so faint and so unresonant as to suggest some actual deficiency in her vocal cords. As soon as he became conscious of this peculiarity, he found his attention wandering from the meaning of her speech and focusing itself upon her curious intonation.
But she moved to the fireplace now and bent her back over it, striking a little lump of coal with an extremely large silver poker.
“That girl must be sick of admiration,” observed Wolf, “wouldn’t you think so? Her mother must have an anxious time.”
“I expect her mother knows how well she can take care of herself,” retorted Christie, glancing sideways at him while she rested on the handle of the poker. A couple of thin loose tresses of silky brown hair hung down across her brow, her nose, her mouth, her chin, giving the impression that she was peering out at him through the drooping tendrils of some sort of wild vegetation.
Her remark, as may well be imagined, was not received with any great ardour by her guest.
“What an expression!” he cried petulantly. “Take care of herself! Why the devil shouldn’t she take care of herself?” And it occurred to him to wonder how it was that this sophisticated young lady had ever made friends with the stonecutter’s daughter. Christie’s manners were so well-bred that it was difficult to associate her with a family like the Torps.
The girl smiled as she replaced the silver poker by the side of the hearth. “Gerda knows well enough that I don’t worry about her,” she said. “Pardon me a minute,” she added, slipping past him into an alcove that adjoined the room.
Wolf took advantage of her absence to move across to a bookshelf which already had attracted his attention. What first arrested his interest now was an edition of Sir Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia, or Urn-Burial. He took this book down from the shelf, and was dreamily turning its pages, when the girl returned with a glass of claret in her hand. Hurriedly replacing the book in its place and raising the wine to his lips, he could not resist commenting upon some other, more abstruse volumes that her bookshelf contained.
“I see you read Leibnitz, Miss Malakite,” he said. “Don’t you find those ‘monads’ of his hard to understand? You’ve got Hegel there, too, I notice. I’ve always been rather attracted to him—though just why, I’d be puzzled to tell you.”
He settled himself again in his wicker-chair, wineglass in hand.
“You’re fond of philosophy?” he added, scowling amiably at her. His thick eyebrows contracted as he did this, and his eyes grew narrow and small.
She seated herself near him upon the sofa and smoothed out her brown skirt thoughtfully with her fingers. She was evidently anxious to answer this important question with a becoming scrupulousness.
With this new gravity upon the features of its mistress, it seemed to Wolf as if the little sitting-room itself awoke from somnolence and asserted its individuality. He observed the unadulterated mid-century style of its cut-glass chandeliers, of its antimacassars, of its rosewood chairs, of its Geneva clock, and of the heavy gold frames of its watercolour pictures. The room, as the morning light fell upon these things across the grey slate roofs and the yellow pansies in the window-box, certainly did possess a charming character of its own, a character to which the thick, dusky carpet and the great mahogany curtain-rod across the window gave the final touches.
“I don’t understand half of what I read,” Christie began, speaking with extreme precision. “All I know is that every one of those old books has its own atmosphere for me.”
“Atmosphere?” questioned Wolf.
“I suppose it’s funny to talk in such a way,” she went on, “but all these queer nonhuman abstractions, like Spinoza’s ‘substance’ and Leibnitz’s ‘monads’ and Hegel’s ‘idea,’ don’t stay hard and logical to me. They seem to melt.”
She stopped and looked at Wolf with a faint smile, as if deprecating her extravagant pedantry.
“What do you mean—melt?” he murmured.
“I mean as I say,” she answered, with a shade of querulousness, as if the physical utterance of words were difficult to her and she expected her interlocutor to get her meaning independently of them. “I mean they turn into what I call ‘atmosphere.’ ”
“The tone of thought,” he threw in, “that suits you best, I suppose?”
She looked at him as if she had been blowing soap-bubbles and he had thrown his stick at one of them.
“I’m afraid I’m hopeless at expressing myself,” she said. “I don’t think I regard philosophy in the light of ‘truth’ at all.”
“How do you regard it then?”
Christie Malakite sighed. “There are so many of them!” she murmured irrelevantly.
“So many?”
“So many truths. But don’t tease yourself trying to follow my awkward ways of putting things, Mr. Solent.”
“I’m following you with the greatest interest,” said Wolf.
“What I mean to say is,” she went on, with a little gasp, flinging out the words almost fiercely, “I regard each philosophy, not as the ‘truth,’ but just as a particular country, in which I can go about—countries with their own peculiar light, their Gothic buildings, their pointed roofs, their avenues of trees—But I’m afraid I’m tiring you with all this!”
“Go on, for heaven’s sake!” he pleaded. “It’s just what I want to hear.”
“I mean that it’s like the way you feel about things,” she explained, “when you hear the rain outside, while you’re reading a book. You know what I mean? Oh, I can’t put it into words! When you get a sudden feeling of life going on outside … far away from where you sit … over wide tracts of country … as if you were driving in a carriage and all the things you passed were . . life itself … parapets of bridges, with dead leaves blowing over them … trees at crossroads … park-railings … lamp-lights on ponds. … I don’t mean, of course,” she went on, “that philosophy is the same as life … but—Oh! Can’t you see what I mean?” She broke off with an angry gesture of impatience.
Wolf bit his lip to suppress a smile. At that moment he could have hugged the nervous little figure before him.
“I know perfectly well what you mean,” he said eagerly. “Philosophy to you, and to me, too, isn’t science at all! It’s life winnowed and heightened. It’s the essence of life caught on the wing. It’s life framed … framed in room-windows … in carriage-windows … in mirrors … in our ‘brown-studies,’ when we look up from absorbing books … in waking-dreams—I do know perfectly well what you mean!”
Christie drew up her feet beneath her on the sofa and turned her head, so that all he could see of her face was its delicate profile, a profile which, in that particular position, reminded him of a portrait of the philosopher Descartes!
He changed the conversation back to himself. “It’s queer,” he remarked, “that I can confide in you so completely about Gerda.”
“Why?” she threw out.
“Don’t you see that what I’m admitting is an unscrupulous desire to make love to your young friend?”
“Oh!” She uttered this exclamation in a faint, meditative sigh, like a wistful little wind sinking down among feathery reeds. “You mean that you might make her unhappy?”
He gave a deprecatory shake of the head.
“But you leave out so many things in all this,” she went on. “You leave out the character of Gerda; and you leave out your own character, which, for all I know”—she spoke in a tone whose irony was barely perceptible—“may be so interesting that the advantage of contact with it might even counterbalance—your lack of scruple!”
Wolf withdrew his hands, which were clasped so close to Christie’s elbows as almost to touch them. He interlocked his fingers now, round the back of his head, tilting his chair a little. “Forgive me, Miss Malakite,” he said ruefully. “I do blunder into unpardonable lapses sometimes. I oughtn’t to have said that to you … so bluntly. It’s because I seem to have … a sort of … curiosity. At least I think it’s curiosity!”
“It’s all right. Don’t you mind!” She spoke these words with a tenderness that was as gentle as a caress—a caress which might have been given to a disgraced animal that required reassuring; and as she spoke she leaned forward and made a little movement of her hand towards him. It was the faintest of gestures. Her fingers immediately afterwards lay clasped on her lap. But he did not miss the movement, and it pleased him well. Another thing he did not miss was that under any stress of emotion a certain wavering shapelessness in her countenance disappeared. Mouth, nose, cheeks, chin, all these features, chaotic and inchoate when left to themselves, at such moments attained a harmony of expression which approached, if it did not actually reach, the verge of the beautiful.
Wolf brought down his tilted chair upon the floor with a jerk.
“I’m forgiven then?” he said, and paused for a second, searching gravely in her brown eyes for a clue to her secret thoughts. “It must be all those books you read,” he went on, “that makes you take my scandalous confessions so calmly.” He stopped once more. “I suppose,” he flung out, “the most amazing perversities wouldn’t shock you in the least!” As soon as he had uttered these words he remembered what Darnley had told him, and he caught his breath in dismay. But Christie Malakite gave no sign of being distressed. She even smiled faintly.
“I don’t know,” she said, “that it’s my readings that have made me what I am. In a sense I am conventional. You’re wrong there. But in another sense I am … what you might call … outside the pale.”
“Do you mean … inhuman?”
She turned this over gravely.
“I certainly don’t like it when things get too human,” she said. “That’s probably why I can’t bear the Bible. I like to be able to escape into parts of Nature that are lovely and cool, untouched and free.”
Wolf nodded sympathetically; but he got up now to take his leave, and allowed these words of hers to float away unanswered. He allowed them, as he moved to the door, to sink down among the old-fashioned furniture about her, as if they were a chilly, moonlight dew mingling with warm, dusty sun-motes. His final impression was that the ancient objects in her room were pondering mutely and disapprovingly upon this fragile heathen challenge to the anthropomorphism of the Scriptures!
Once out in the street—and strangely enough before his mind reverted to Gerda at all—Wolf found himself recalling something he had hardly noticed at the time, but which now assumed a curious importance. Between the pages of the volume of the Urn-Burial which he had taken down from Christie’s shelf, there had lain a grey feather. “Her marker, I suppose!” he said to himself, as he made his way back to the High Street.
But soon enough, now, in the hard metallic sunshine and the sharp wind, his obsession for the stonecutter’s daughter rose up again and dominated his consciousness. With rapid strides he made his way through the chief thoroughfares of the town, witnessing on every side all manner of bustling lively preparations for the Saturday afternoon’s marketing.
When he was within a few hundred yards of the Torp yard, he glanced at his watch and realized that he was still a good deal too early. It would be, he felt, a great blunder to present himself at that house, and find no Gerda! Looking around for a resting-place, he espied a small patch of grass behind some rickety palings, in the centre of which was a stone water-trough. He clambered through the palings and sat down on the ground, with his back to this object. It was then, as he lit a cigarette, that he remembered that he had not yet read his letters.
He opened them one by one. They were both short. Miss Gault’s ran as follows—
My dear boy:
If I were not so eccentric a person and striking, I may say, in more senses than one, I should take for granted that you had forgotten all about me—but since I know that both my manners and my cats must have made some impression upon you, I am not at all afraid of this! I am writing to ask you whether you will care to come over to tea with me on Sunday afternoon? I will not reveal in advance whether there will be only myself and my cats …
Mrs. Solent’s letter was even more laconic.
My dearest Wolf:
Carter has begun to fuss about the rent. What does he think we are? And why did you run up that bill at Walpole’s? That’s the one kind of luxury which ought always to be paid for in cash. I have refused to pay till the Summer. Better let it be understood that you’re away on a holiday! I think I shall join you at King’s Barton quite soon; in fact, as soon as you can assure me that you’ve discovered a clean, small cottage, with a neat, small garden. I think it will do me good to do a little gardening. How lovely, my dear, it will be to see you again!
Wolf pushed out his underlip and drew down the corners of his mouth, as he replaced these two documents in his pocket. Then he got up upon his feet and shivered. He looked at his watch again. “I’ll go in,” he said to himself, “when it’s five minutes to one.”
He pulled his greatcoat tighter around him, and, removing his cloth-cap, sat down upon it very gravely, as if it had been a wishing-carpet.
The passersby upon the pavement hardly turned to notice the bareheaded man with an oak-stick across his knees. They were Blacksod burgesses and had their own affairs to attend to. A tuft of vividly green grass grew between some uneven bricks in front of him; and he regarded its sturdy, transparent blades with concentrated interest.
“Grass and clay!” he thought to himself. “From clay to grass and then from grass to clay!” And once more that peculiar kind of shivering ran through him, which a coincidence of physical cold with amorous excitement is apt to produce, especially when some fatal step of unknown consequence is trembling in suspension.
And with extraordinary clearness he realized that particular moment in the passing of time, as he sat there, a hunched-up gaunt figure, wrapped in a faded brown overcoat, waiting with a beating heart his entrance to the yard of Mr. Torp.
His mind, after his fashion, conjured up in geographical simultaneousness all the scenes around him. He saw the long, low ridge of upland, on the east slope of which lay the village of King’s Barton, and along the top of which ran the highroad linking together the scholastic retreats of Ramsgard with the shops and tanneries of Blacksod. He saw the rich, pastoral Dorsetshire valley on his right. He saw the willows and the reeds of the Somerset salt-marshes away there on his left. And it came into his mind how strange it was that while he at this moment was shivering with amorous expectation at the idea of entering that yard of half-made tombstones, far off in the Blackmore Vale many old ploughmen, weather-stained as the gates they were even now leisurely setting open, were moving their horses from one furrowed field to another after their midday’s rest and meal. And probably almost all of them had relations who would come to Mr. Torp’s yard on their behalf one day.
“I’ll go to Miss Gault on Sunday,” he said to himself, “and I’ll look around for a place for mother.”
Swinging his mind from these resolutions with an abrupt turn, emphasized by a dagger-like thrust into the earth with the end of his stick, he now struggled to his feet, and without glancing again at his watch, clambered over the palings and strode down the road.
The appearance of Torp’s yard seemed to have changed in the night. It looked smaller, less imposing. The headstones themselves looked second-rate; but Wolf, as he made for the door, wondered which of them it was that had served the girl for a hobbyhorse, and this doubt once more lent them dignity.
He knocked boldly at the door; but he had time, while the vibrations of the sound were dying down, to notice that there was a crack in one of the door-panels, and in the middle of this crack a tiny globule of dirty paint.
The door was opened by Mrs. Torp. There they all were, just beginning their meal! Gerda was evidently disposing of no small helping of Yorkshire pudding. But she swallowed her mouthful at one gallant gulp and regarded her admirer with a smile of pleasure.
The first words uttered by Wolf, when Mrs. Torp had shut the door behind him, were directed at the head of the family, whose mouth and eyes were simultaneously so wide open as to suggest sheer panic.
“I haven’t come about business today. I only happened to be passing and I thought I’d look in. Mr. Urquhart was very pleased to hear how well you’re getting on with that monument. I saw him last night.”
Mr. Torp turned his countenance toward his wife, a proceeding which seemed to announce to everyone round the table that he was too cautious even to commit himself to a word, until reassured as to what was expected of him.
“Just passing, and thought to look in,” repeated Mrs. Torp, avoiding her husband’s appeal.
“We seed three girt woppers down to Willum’s Mill. We dursn’t pull ’em out, cos Mr. Manley his own self were casting. He were fishing proper, he were. But Bob says maybe Mr. Manley won’t be at the job, come Monday. So then us’ll try again.”
These hurried words from young Lob eased the atmosphere a little.
Mrs. Torp looked at the sirloin in front of her husband and at the Yorkshire pudding in front of herself.
“Thought to look in,” she repeated, resuming her seat.
Wolf began to feel something of a fool. He also began to feel extremely hungry. He laid his hand on the shoulder of the boy, and was on the point of saying something about perch and chub, to cover his embarrassment, when he detected a quick interchange of glances between mother and daughter, followed by the appearance of a faint flush on the girl’s cheeks.
“Since you were passing, you’d be best to sit ’ee down and take a bit of summat,” said the woman reluctantly. “Father, cut the young gentleman a slice. Get a plate from the dresser, Lob.” Thus speaking, she thrust a chair beneath the table, with more violence than was necessary, and having added a very moderate portion of Yorkshire pudding to the immense slice of beef carved by the monument-maker, she caught up her own empty plate and retired into the scullery.
When once his guest was seated at the table, between the silent Gerda and himself, the obese stonecutter relaxed into most free pleasantry.
“Injoy theeself like the wheel at the cistern, be my text, Mr. Redfern, I beg pardon, Mr. Solent. The Lord gives beef, but us must go to the Devil for sauce, as my granddad used to murmur. I warrant this meat were well fed and well killed, as you might say. ’Tain’t always so wi’ they Darset farmers.”
Wolf listened in silence to these and other similar remarks while he ate his meal. He was so close to Gerda that he could catch the faint susurration of her deep, even breathing.
“I’m glad she doesn’t speak,” he thought to himself, in that sensualized level of consciousness which is just below the threshold of mental words; “for unless I could talk to her alone—”
“And so thik beast went to the hammer.” The thread of Mr. Torp’s carnivorous discourse had begun to pass Wolf by, when the foregoing sentence fell like a veritable poleaxe upon his ear. Like a flash he recalled Selena Gault’s words outside the slaughterhouse. “Damn it!” he said to himself. “The woman’s right.”
“Be there any apple-tart, Mammie?” cried Lob, in a shrill voice.
The door of the scullery was opened about three inches, in which space the beckoning forefinger of Joan Torp summoned her son to her side.
Very slowly the beautiful profile on Wolf’s right turned towards her father.
“ ’Tisn’t no use your coaxing of I, Missie,” responded the stonecutter. “What yer Mummie says, yer Mummie says. I reckon she’s just got enough o’ that there pasty to comfort Lob. Us and Mr. Redfern must swetten our bellies by talking sweet; and what’s more, my pet, if I don’t get out in thik yard afore I gets to sleep, there’ll be no pleasing Squire or Mr. Manley!”
Saying this, the man rose from his chair, glanced at Wolf with a leer like the famous uncle of Cressid, and shuffled out of the house, closing the door behind him.
Wolf and Gerda were left alone, seated side by side in uncomfortable silence. He moved his chair back a little and glanced toward the scullery-door. The voice of the woman and her son reached him in an obscure murmur. His eye caught the devastated piece of meat at the end of the table and it brought to his mind the terrifying story of how the flesh of the Oxen of the Sun uttered articulate murmurs as the companions of Odysseus roasted it at their impious campfire.
“I must say something,” he thought. “This silence is beginning to grow comic.”
He began to search his pockets for cigarettes. It seemed absurd to ask leave of this young girl, and yet it was likely enough that her shrewish mother detested tobacco.
“You don’t mind if I smoke?” he said.
Gerda smilingly shook her head.
“I suppose you’ve often been told that you’re as lovely as the girl who was the cause of the Trojan War?”
“What a way of breaking the ice!” he thought to himself, and felt a pang of mental humiliation. “If the wench is going to dull my wits to this extent, I’ll miss my chance and be just where I was yesterday.” Under cover of what Darnley had called the girl’s terrible passivity, which was indeed just then like the quiescence of a great unpicked white phlox in a sun-warmed garden, he lit his cigarette and ransacked his brain for a line of action.
Desperately he hit upon the most obvious one. “Have you got anything to put on within reach?” he whispered rapidly. “I want to see something more of you. Let’s step out while we’ve got the chance and go for a stroll somewhere!”
The girl remained for a moment in motionless indecision, listening intently to the murmuring voices in the scullery. Then, with a grave nod, she rose to her feet and stepped lightly to a curtained recess, behind which she vanished. Returning in less than a minute she presented herself in hat and cloak.
Wolf, trembling with a nervous excitement that made his stomach feel sick, seized his own coat and stick and moved boldly to the door.
“Come on!” he whispered. “Come on!”
They slipped out together and the girl closed the door behind them with cautious celerity.
The stonecutter’s chisel could be heard in his open shed; but his back must have been turned to them, and they did not cast a glance in his direction. Into the street they passed, Wolf taking care not to let the latch of the gate click. Instinctively he led his captive to the right, away from the town. They walked rapidly side by side, and Wolf noted with surprise the absence of finery in the things worn by his silent companion. The hat was of cream-coloured felt surrounded by a blue band; the cloak of some soft plain stuff, also cream-coloured. Wolf kept walking a good deal faster than circumstances seemed to demand, but he repeatedly fancied he heard the light steps of the intrusive Lob running in pursuit of them.
Before long they reached a place where a broad road branched to the left at the foot of a considerable hill. Wolf had not remembered passing this turn on the preceding day; but his attention must have been occupied with the row of little villas on the other side.
Following his instinct again, he turned up this road and slackened his pace. Still his companion remained perfectly silent; but she appeared quite untroubled by the rapidity of their movement, and she swung along by his side lightly and easily, every now and then brushing the budding hedge on her right with her bare hand.
For about half a mile they advanced up the long, steady hill, meeting no one and seeing nothing but snatches of sloping meadow-land as they passed various five-barred gates.
Then there came a turn to the left, and all of a sudden, over a well-worn wooden stile, the top bar of which was shiny as a piece of old furniture, they found themselves overlooking the whole town of Blacksod, and, away beyond that, the pollard-bordered course of the sluggish Lunt, as it crossed the invisible borderline between Dorset and Somerset.
“What do you call this hill, Missie?” he murmured, as he recovered his breath. It seemed impertinent to use her Christian name quite so quickly; but no stretch of politeness could have induced him just then to utter the syllable Torp.
“Babylon Hill,” she replied quite naturally and easily; for she was less out of breath than he.
“Babylon? What an extraordinary name!” he cried. “Why Babylon?”
But at that she shrugged her young shoulders and contemplated the blue distances of Somersetshire. To her mind the extraordinary thing evidently was that anyone could be surprised that Babylon Hill was called Babylon Hill!
From the stile over which they were leaning a little field-path ran along the sloping greensward and lost itself in a small hazel-copse that overshadowed one end of a rounded tableland of turf-covered earthworks.
“Come on,” he cried. “Skip over, child; and let’s see where that leads!”
She swung herself across without any assistance, and Wolf noticed that in the open country the movements of her body were entirely free from languor or voluptuousness. They became the swift, unconscious movements of a very healthy young animal.
“Has this got any name?” he remarked, as they clambered up the turfy slope of the grassy rampart.
“Poll’s Camp,” she answered. And then, after a pause,
“When Poll his rain-cap has got on
They’ll get their drink at Dunderton!”
She repeated this in the peculiar singsong drawl of a children’s game.
There was something in her intonation that struck Wolf as queerly touching. It didn’t harmonize with her ladylike attire. It suggested the simple finery of a thousand West Country fairs.
“Poll-Poll-Poll,” he repeated. And there came over him a deep wonder about the origin of this laborious piece of human toil. Were they Celts or Romans who actually, with their blunt primitive spades, had changed the face of this hill? Was this silent beautiful girl beside him the descendant of some Ionian soldier who had come in the train of the legionaries?
Dallying with these thoughts—which probably would never have come into his head at all, if a certain childishness in the girl hadn’t, in a very subtle manner, lessened the bite of his lust—Wolf was slower than she in reaching the top of the ridge. When he did reach the top, and looked down into the rounded hollow below, he was astonished to see no sign of his companion.
“Good Lord!” he thought, “has she gone round to the right or to the left?”
He ran down into the bottom of the little artificial valley and stood hesitating.
How like a child, to play him a trick of this kind!
His thoughts shaped themselves quickly now. His hope of finding her depended on how far he could sound her basic instincts. If she were of a hare-like nature she would double on her tracks, which in this case would mean turning to the left or right; if she were of the feline tribe she would pursue her course, which in this case would mean climbing the opposing earthwork. Wolf turned to the right and followed the narrow green hollow as it wound round the hill.
Ah, there she was!
Gerda lay supine, her arms outstretched, her cream-coloured hat clutched tight in one of her hands, her knees bare.
She waited till Wolf was so close that he could see that her eyes were shut. Then, catching the vibration of his tread upon the turf, she leapt to her feet and was off again, running like Atalanta, and soon vanishing from sight. Wolf pursued her; but he thought to himself, “I won’t run quite as fast as I could! She’ll better enjoy being caught if she has had a good race.”
As a matter of fact, so swift-footed was the damsel that by following this method of leisurely pursuit he soon lost her altogether. The hollow trench ran straight into the heart of a thick coppice which from this point outwards had overgrown the whole of the camp. Here, in the heavy undergrowth, composed of brambles, elder-bushes, dead bracken, stunted sycamores, and newly-budded hazels, all ordinary paths disappeared completely. All he could have done was to have followed obstinately the bottom of the trench; and that was so overgrown that it was unbelievable she should have forced a way there. But if he didn’t follow the trench, where the devil should he go? Where, under the sky, had she gone? “The earth hath bubbles as the water hath,” he quoted to himself, amused, irritated, and completely nonplussed. Teased into doing what he knew was the last thing calculated to bring her back, he began calling her name; at first gently and hesitatingly; at last loudly and indignantly. The girl, no doubt panting like a hunted fawn somewhere quite close to him, must have been especially delighted by this issue to the affair; for one of the peculiarities of Poll’s Camp was the presence of an echo; and now, over and over again, this echo taunted him. “Ger‑da—Ger‑da!” it flung across the valley.
He would have been more philosophical at this juncture if he hadn’t, at that brief moment of overtaking her, caught sight of those incredibly white knees. But the impatience in his senses was at least mitigated by his appreciation of the immemorial quality of his pursuit! He looked round helplessly and whimsically at the thick undergrowth and sturdy hazel-twigs; and he played with the fancy that, like another Daphne or Syrinx, his maid might have undergone some miraculous vegetable transformation.
“Ger—da! Ger—da!” The echo returned to him again; whereupon once more, the image of those bare knees destroyed the spirit of philosophical patience.
But he sat down then, with his back against a young sycamore, and lit a cigarette, wrapping his overcoat carefully round him and resolving to make the best of a bad job.
“If she has run away from me,” he thought, “and just gone back to Chequers Street, there’s no doubt she’ll come out with me again. She certainly seemed at ease with me.” Thus spoke one voice within him. Another voice said: “She thinks you’re the father of all fools. You’ll never have the gall to ask her to go out with you again.” And then as he extinguished his third cigarette against a piece of chalk, moving aside the tiny green buds of an infinitesimal spray of milkwort, he became aware that a blackbird, in the dark twilight of hazel-stems, was uttering notes of an extraordinary purity and poignance.
He listened, fascinated. That particular intonation of the blackbird’s note, more full of the spirits of air and of water than any sound upon earth, had always possessed a mysterious attraction for him. It seemed to hold, in the sphere of sound, what amber-paved pools surrounded by hart’s-tongue ferns contain in the sphere of substance. It seemed to embrace in it all the sadness that it is possible to experience without crossing the subtle line into the region where sadness becomes misery.
He listened, spellbound, forgetting hamadryads, Daphne’s pearl-white knees and everything.
The delicious notes hovered through the wood—hovered over the scented turf where he lay—and went wavering down the hollow valley. It was like the voice of the very spirit of Poll’s Camp, unseduced by Roman or by Saxon, pouring forth to a sky whose peculiar tint of indescribable greyness exactly suited the essence of its identity, the happiness of that sorrow which knows nothing of misery. Wolf sat entranced, just giving himself up to listen; forgetting all else. He was utterly unmusical; and it may have been for that very reason that the quality of certain sounds in the world melted the very core of his soul. Certain sounds could do it; not very many. But the blackbird’s note was one of them. And then it was that without rising from the ground he straightened his back against the sycamore-tree and got furiously red under his rugged cheeks. Even his tow-coloured hair, protruding from the front of his cap, seemed conscious of his humiliation. Waves of electricity shivered through it; while beads of perspiration ran down his forehead into his scowling eyebrows.
For he realized, in one rush of shame, that Gerda was the blackbird!
He realized this before she made a sound other than that long-sustained tremulous whistle. He realized it instantaneously by a kind of sudden absolute knowledge, like a slap in the face.
And then, immediately afterwards, she came forward, quite calmly and coolly, pushing aside the hazels and the elder-bushes.
He found her a different being, when she stood there in front of him, smiling down upon him and removing bits of moss and twigs from her hair. She had lost something from the outermost sheath of her habitual reserve; and like a plant that has unloosed its perianth she displayed some inner petal of her personality that had, until that moment, been quite concealed from him.
“Gerda!” he exclaimed reproachfully, too disordered to assume any sagacious reticence; “how on earth did you learn to whistle like that?”
She continued placidly to clear the wood-rubble out of her fair hair; and the only reply she vouchsafed to his question was to toss down her cream-coloured hat at his feet.
Very deliberately, when her hair was in order, she proceeded to lift up the hem of her skirt and pick out the burs from that. Then she quickly turned away from him. “Brush my back, will you?” she said.
He had to get up upon his feet at this; but he obeyed her with all patience, carefully removing from the cream-coloured jacket every vestige of her escapade.
“There!” he said, when he had finished; and taking her by the shoulders, he swung her around.
In the very act of doing this he had determined to kiss her; but something about the extraordinary loveliness of her face, when she did confront him, deterred him.
This was a surprise to himself at the moment; but later, analyzing it, he came to the conclusion that although beauty, up to a certain point, is provocative of lust, beyond a certain point it is destructive of lust; and it is this, whether the possessor of such beauty be in a chaste mood or not.
If only—so he thought to himself later—Gerda’s face had been a little less flawless in its beauty, the beauty of her body would have remained as maddening to his senses as it was at the beginning. But the more he had seen of her the more beautiful her face had grown; until it had now reached that magical level of loveliness which absorbs with a kind of absoluteness the whole aesthetic sense, paralyzing the erotic sensibility.
Instead of kissing her he sat down again with his back to the sycamore; while Gerda, lying on her stomach at his feet, her chin propped upon the palms of her hands, began to talk to him in unconscious, easy, almost boyish freedom.
“I wouldn’t have run away,” she said, “so you needn’t scold. I would have if it had been anyone else. I always do run away. I hide first and then slip off. Father’s quite tired of seeing me come back into the yard after I’ve started for a walk with someone. That’s because I always like people at the beginning, when they’re frightened of me and don’t try to touch me. But when they stop being frightened, and get familiar, I just hate them. Can you understand what I mean, or can’t you?”
Wolf surveyed the beautiful face in front of him and recalled what Darnley had said about the three lovers.
“But, Gerda—” he began.
“Well?” she said, smiling. “Say it out! I know it’s something bad.”
“You must have had some love-affairs, being the sort of girl you are. You can’t make me believe you’ve always run away.”
She nodded her head vigorously.
“I have,” she said. “I have, always. Though the boys I know never will believe it. Directly they touch me I run away. I want them to want me. It’s a lovely feeling to be wanted like that. It’s like floating on a wave. But when they try any of their games, messing a person about and rumpling a person’s clothes, I can’t bear it. I won’t bear it, either!”
Wolf lifted his thick eyebrows and let them fall again, wrinkling them so that a great puckered fold established itself above his hooked nose. His ruddy face, under its rough crop of coarse, bleached hair, resembled a red sandstone cliff on the top of which a whitish-yellow patch of withered grass bowed before the wind.
The girl clambered to her feet, and, smoothing out her skirt beneath her, sat down on the ground by his side, hugging her knees.
“I found out I could whistle like that,” she began again, this time in a slow, meditative voice, “when I used to play with Bob in the Lunt ditches, down Longmead. I fooled him endless times doing different birds. Listen to this. Do you know what this is?” And with her mouth pursed up into the form of a crimson sea-anemone, she imitated the cry of the female plover when any strange foot, of man or beast, approaches her nest on the ground.
“Wonderful!” cried Wolf, enraptured by that long-drawn familiar scream borne away upon the wind. “How did you learn to do it?”
“I fooled Bob with that; but I fooled Dick—he was an Oxford gentleman—with a silly owl’s-hooting which old Bob would have known at once.”
“Did you let the Oxford gentleman make love to you, Gerda?”
As soon as he had uttered the words, he felt a sense of shame that was like a pricking sore lodged under the cell-lobes in the front of his brain.
“There—don’t answer!” he whispered hurriedly. “That was a gross remark of mine.”
But the half-profile which she had turned upon him showed no traces of anger.
“I told you, didn’t I?” was all she said. “I ran away. I hid. I hid in the hedge under Ramsbottom. Dick was furious. He went past me several times. I heard him damning me like a serjeant—Ramsbottom’s miles away. We’d taken our lunch. He had to go home without me and he told mother. Mother hit me with the broom when I got back. Dick was an ‘honourable’; so Mother wanted me to marry him.”
Wolf was reduced to silence. He watched the flutterings of a greenfinch over some young elder-bush saplings. Then he turned towards her and spoke with solemn emphasis.
“I wish you’d make that blackbird-noise for me now, Gerda.”
He detected from her expression that this was a crisis between them. Her smile was suspended and hung like a faltering wraith over every feature of her face. She seemed to hesitate; and her hesitation brought a depth into her eyes that darkened their colour so that they became a deep violet.
“I’ve never once whistled for anybody,” she said slowly.
Wolf sent a wordless cry of appeal down into the abysses of his consciousness. They were ready to help him, those powers in the hidden levels of his being. They responded to his cry and he knew that they responded. In the repetition of his request there was a magnetic tone of power that reassured himself.
“Come on, Gerda!” he said. “That’s all the more reason. Come on! Whistle that song!”
Turning her face away from him, so that he could see nothing of her mouth, she began at once.
He could hardly believe his ears. It was like a miracle. It was as if she had swiftly summoned one of those yellow-beaked birds out of its leafy retreat. It seemed easier that a bird should be decoyed out of a wood than that a human throat should utter actual unmistakable bird-notes.
“Go on! Go on!” cried Wolf, in an ecstasy of pleasure, the moment there was any cessation of this stream of cool, liquid, tremulous melody.
Over the turf-ramparts of Poll’s Camp it swelled and sank, that wistful, immortal strain. Away down the grassy slopes it floated forth upon the March wind. No conceivable sky but one of that particular greyness could have formed the right kind of roof for the utterance of this sound. Wolf cared nothing that the whistler kept her face turned aside as she whistled. He gave himself up so completely to the voice, that the girl Gerda became no more than a voice herself. At length it did really cease, and silence seemed to fall down upon that place like large grey feathers from some inaccessible height.
Both the man and the girl remained absolutely motionless for a while.
Then Gerda leapt to her feet.
“Let’s go down to Longmead and watch the water-rats swim the Lunt!” she cried. “We can get down there from here easily. There’s a lovely little field-path I know. And we shan’t meet anyone; for Bob and Lobbie are going to Willum’s Mill.”
Wolf rose stiffly. He had sat so long in petrified delight that he was a little cramped. His mind felt drugged and cramped too, and felicitously stupid.
“Wherever you like, Gerda dear,” he said, looking at her with hypnotized admiration.
She took him by the hand, and together they climbed the embankment.
The wind was gentler now, and a very curious diffusion of thin, watery, greenish light seemed to have melted into the grey stretches of sky above their heads. The immense Somersetshire plain, with patches of olive-green marshland and patches of moss-green meadow-land, lost itself in a pale, sad horizon, where, like a king’s sepulchre, rose the hill-ruin of Glastonbury. The path by which Gerda guided him down to the valley was indeed an ideal one for two companions who desired no interruption. Starting from a pheasants’ “drive” in the lower half of the hazel-copse, it wound its way down the incline along a series of grassy terraces dotted by patches of young bracken-fronds that had only very recently sprouted up among the great dead brown leaves.
Arrived at the foot of the hill, they struck a narrow cattle-drove where the deep winter-ditches were still full of water and where huge half-fallen willow-trunks lay across old lichen-covered palings.
Advancing up this lane hand in hand with his companion, Wolf felt his soul invaded by that peculiar kind of melancholy which emanates, at the end of a spring day, from all the elements of earth and water. It is a sadness unlike all others, and has perhaps some mysterious connection with the swift, sudden recognition, by myriads and myriads of growing things, of the strange fatality that pursues all earthly life, whether clothed in flesh or clothed in vegetable fibre. It is a sadness accentuated by grey skies, grey water, and grey horizons; but it does not seem to attain its most significant meaning until the pressure of the Spring adds to these elemental wraiths the intense wistfulness of young new life.
It seemed to Wolf, as they plodded along side by side through that muddy lane, that the light-green buds of those aged willow-trunks were framed in a more appropriate setting under that cold forlorn sky than any sunshine could give to them. Later seasons would warm them and cherish them. November rains would turn them yellow and bring them down into the mud.
But no other sky would hang above them with the cold floating weight of sadness as this one did—a weight like a mass of grey seaweed beneath a silent sea. No other sky would be cold enough and motionless enough to actually listen to the rising of the green sap within them, that infinitesimal flowing, flowing, flowing, that for nonhuman ears must have made strange low gurglings and susurrations all day long.
At last they came to the bank of the river Lunt.
“Hush!” whispered Gerda. “Don’t make a noise! It’s so lovely when you can make a water-rat flop in and see it swim across.”
It was along the edge of a small tributary full of marsh-marigolds that they approached the riverbank. Gerda was so impatient to hear a water-rat splash that she scarcely glanced at these great yellow orbs rising from thick, moist, mud-stained stalks and burnished leaves; but to Wolf, as he passed them by, there came rushing headlong out of that ditch, like an invisible company of tossing-maned air-horses, a whole wild herd of ancient memories! Indescribable! Indescribable! They had to do with wild rain-drenched escapes beneath banks of sombre clouds, of escapes along old backwaters and by forsaken sea-estuaries, of escapes along wet, deserted moor-paths and by sighing pond-reeds; along melancholy quarry-pools and by quagmires of livid moss. Indescribable! Indescribable! But memories of this kind were—and he had long known it!—the very essence of his life. They were more important to him than any outward event. They were more sacred to him than any living person. They were his friends, his gods, his secret religion. Like a mad botanist, like a crazed butterfly-collector, he hunted these filmy growths, these wild wanderers, and stored them up in his mind. For what purpose did he store them up? For no purpose! And yet these things were connected in some mysterious way with that mythopoeic fatality which drove him on and on and on.
“There’s one! There’s one! There’s one! Oh, throw something to make it go faster. Throw something! Quick! Quick! Quick! No—I don’t mean to hit it. I don’t mean to hurt it. To make it swim faster! There! I can’t throw straight. Oh, do look at its head breathing and puffing! Oh, what ripples it makes!”
Conjured in this way to join in this sport, Wolf did pick up an enormous piece of wet mud and hurled it in the trail of the swimming rat.
The muddy ripples from this missile came rushing up behind that pointed little head, came splashing against those pointed little ears. Gerda clasped her hands. “Swim! Swim! Swim!” she called out; and then in her excitement she pouted her mouth into a reed-mouth and uttered a long, strange, low, liquid cry that was like no sound Wolf had ever heard in his life.
“It’s gone! It’s done it!” she sighed at last, when the rat, emerging from the water without so much as one shake of its sleek sides, slid off along its mud-channel to its bed in the reed-roots. “It’s gone! And you did make it swim! I liked to see it. Let’s go rat-swimming often. It’s wonderful!”
She began walking along the riverbank in the direction leading away from Blacksod, gazing intently and rapturously at the sluggish brown stream.
Wolf followed her, but he surreptitiously glanced at his watch, and discovered, as he suspected, that it was already late in the afternoon.
“You can’t tell when twilight begins,” he thought to himself, “when the sky is all twilight.”
“Hush!” The sound reached him rather by implication than by ear. But the girl had crouched down under an overhanging alder and was staring at the water, her long cream-coloured arms supporting half the weight of her body.
He sat down himself and waited patiently. It satisfied his nature with an ineffable satisfaction to watch that steady flow of the brown water, gurgling round the willow-roots and the muddy concavities of the bank. He felt glad that the Lunt, where he was now watching it, had left the town behind and was now to meet with nothing else really contaminating until it mingled with the Bristol Channel. He had already begun to feel a peculiar personal friendliness toward this patient muddy stream; and it gave him pleasure to think that its troubles were really over, when itself might so easily be fearing another Blacksod somewhere between these green meadows and the salt sea to which it ran! Looking quite as intently at these brown waters as Gerda herself was doing, it occurred to him how different a thing the personality of a river is from the personality of a sea. The water of the sea, though broken up into tides and waves, really remains the same identical mass of waters; whereas the water of a river is at every succeeding moment a completely different body. No particles of it are ever the same, unless they get waylaid in some side-stream or ditch or weir.
Wolf tried to visualize the whole course of the Lunt, so as to win for it some sort of coherent personality. By thinking of all its waters together, from start to finish, this unity could be achieved; for between the actual water before him now, into which he could thrust his hand, and the water of that tiny streamlet among the mid-Dorset hills from which it sprung, there was no spacial gap. The one flowed continuously into the other. They were as completely united as the head and tail of a snake! The more he stared at the Lunt the more he liked the Lunt. He liked its infinite variety; the extraordinary number of its curves and hollows and shelving ledges and pools and currents; the extraordinary variety of organic patterns in the roots and twigs and branches and land-plants and water-plants which diversified its course.
While he was thinking all this he had turned his attention away from Gerda; but now, glancing up the river, he was struck by a gleam of living whiteness amid the greenery. The huntress of water-rats had slipped off her shoes and stockings and was dabbling her bare feet in the chilly brown water. Her face was bent down. She was not being provocative this time. He felt sure of that. Or, if so, the provocation was directed to something older and less rational than the senses of man. She was giving way to some immemorial girlish desire to expose warm, naked limbs to the cold embraces of the elements.
He rose to his feet, and, moving slowly up to her side, sat down by her. He was struck by the fact that she made no movement to pull her skirts down over her knees. But once again he was made aware, he could not quite tell how, that there was no provocation in this. She had indeed, as Darnley had said, something of the “terrible passivity” of the famous daughter of Leda. Certainly Wolf had never seen, in picture, in marble, or in life, anything as flawless as the loveliness thus revealed to him. It was amazing to him that she did not shiver with the cold. The whole scene, as the hour of twilight grew near, had that kind of unblurred enamelled distinctness such as one sees in the work of certain old English painters. The leaf-buds of the alder under which she sat were of that shade of green that seems to have something almost unnatural in its metallic opacity; and the line of southern sky against which the opposite bank was outlined was of that livid steel-grey which seems to hold within it a suppressed whiteness, like the whiteness of a sword that lies in shadow.
“You’re sure you’re not cold?” Wolf asked.
“Of course I’m cold, silly! I’m doing this to feel cold!”
“What a sensualist you are!”
“Better say nothing if you can’t say anything nicer than that.”
“Gerda.”
“Well?”
“Have you enjoyed yourself today?”
“What do you mean?”
“Have you been happy today?”
She did not answer.
All about those white ankles and those white knees the greenness of the earth gathered—the greyness of the sky descended. It was as if such vague nonhuman powers, made up of green shadows and grey shadows, drew the girl back and away—back and away from all his human words, back and away from all his personal desires.
Commonplace and irrelevant seemed both his sentiment and his cunning in the face of these two great silent Presences—that of the earth and that of the sky—which were closing in upon her and upon himself.
But it was getting too cold. He must make her put on her things and come home.
“That’s enough now,” he said. “On with your stockings, like a good girl. I don’t know when your people expect you back; but anyhow I mustn’t keep Mrs. Otter waiting.”
He took her by the wrist and pulled her up the bank. Then he began vigorously rubbing her ice-cold ankles with his hands.
“You do take care of me nicely,” she said, when finally he pulled her frock over her knees and smoothed out the wrinkles from her cream-coloured coat. “Bob never used to stop for a minute. He was always doing up his tackle or washing his fish or something. And if I did ask him to stop he thought I wanted him to mess me about—you know?—when it was only, like now, that I just couldn’t get my boots on! They get so stiff and funny when you take them off. I never understand why.”
But Wolf’s mind was in no mood to deal with the abstract problem of damp leather. He was wondering in his heart whether Gerda’s mania for water-rats had anything to do with the close resemblance between Mr. Weevil and these harmless rodents.
“What we’ve got to think about now,” he said, “is the shortest way to Blacksod.”
“Oh, don’t worry! We can be at my house in three-quarters of an hour and then you can take the shortcut to Barton.”
Wolf was very much struck by the competent geographical skill with which she now proceeded to guide him, over hedge and over ditch, until they reached a navigable lane.
“We’ll be home in half an hour now,” she said, and the two walked rapidly side by side between the cold, fresh shoots of the hawthorn-hedges and the dark sheen of the celandine-leaves.
“I think I’d be all right now, married to you,” said Gerda, suddenly.
She made the remark in as unemotional and matter-of-fact a tone as if she had said, “I think I’d be all right now if I used low-heeled boots.”
In that chilly twilight, with the white mist rising around them, everything seemed so phantasmal, that this surprising observation gave him no kind of shock. But he did remember how startled he had felt when Christie Malakite introduced the same idea.
“I wonder how I should feel married to you!” murmured Wolf in response, deliberately putting a nuance of irresponsible lightness into his tone.
“I think we’d get on splendidly,” she retorted, with an emphasis that was more boyish than girlish. They walked for a while in silence after this, and Wolf became vividly aware how completely a definite responsible project of such a kind tended to break the delicious spell of carefree intimacy. It broke it for him, anyway. But it must have been just the reverse with her. The beauty of the situation with her evidently had to find its justification in some continuity of events beyond the mere pleasure of the passing moment.
But it was impossible to prevent his thoughts hovering round this bold idea, now it had been flung into the air. Christie Malakite had been the first to toss the fatal little puffball upon the wind. She had done it with the utmost gravity, the gravity of some remote being altogether outside the stream of events. He remembered the peculiar steady look of her brown eyes as she uttered the words. But that this airy nothing of speculation should have received a new impetus from Gerda herself was another matter. He began to wonder what kind of relations existed between these two young girls.
Splashing up the water from a puddle on his right with the end of his stick, he hazarded a direct question on this point.
“I had tea yesterday with Christie Malakite,” he said, “and she told me she was a friend of yours. I liked her so very much.”
“Oh, I shan’t ever be jealous of Christie!” was his companion’s reply to this. “I don’t care if you have tea with Christie every day of your life. She’s for no man, as the game says.”
“What game, Gerda?”
“Oh, don’t you know? That old game! Kids play it together. We called it ‘Boys and Girls’; but likely enough where you come from they call it something else! But it’s the same old game, I reckon.”
“Why do you say Christie Malakite’s ‘for no man,’ Gerda?”
“Don’t ask so many questions, Mr. Wolf Solent. That’s your fault—asking questions! That’s what’ll make me cross when we’re married, more than anything else.”
“But it’s such a queer expression—‘She’s for no man.’ Does it mean she’s got lovers who aren’t human? Does it mean she’s got demon lovers?”
He spoke in a mocking, exaggerated manner, and his tone was irritating to his companion.
“Men think too much of themselves,” she replied laconically. “I like Christie very much and she likes me very much.”
This silenced Wolf; and they walked together in less harmony than at any previous moment in that afternoon.
They hit the town by a narrow alley between the town-hall and Chequers Street. Wolf looked at his watch and compared it with the town-hall clock. It was a quarter past six. There was still plenty of time for him to reach Pond Cottage before eight, when the Otters dined.
They drifted slowly down Chequers Street, Gerda making all manner of quaint, humorous remarks about the people and things they passed; and yet, through it all, Wolf was perfectly aware that she had not forgiven him the hard, frivolous tone he had adopted about her friend. That she was able to chatter and delay as she was now doing had something magnanimously pathetic and even boyish about it. Most girls, as he well knew, would have punished him for the little discordance between them by hurrying home in silence and shutting him out without the comfort of any further appointments. To act in any other way would have seemed to such minds to be lacking in proper pride. But Gerda appeared to have no pride at all in this sense. Or was it that her pride was really something that actually did resemble that high, passive nonchalance which permitted the old classical women to speak of themselves quite calmly, as if they were external to themselves; as if they saw their life as an irresponsible fate upon which they could, as it were, lie back without incurring any human blame?
They said goodbye at the gate of Torp’s yard; and when Wolf enquired how soon he could see her again, “Oh, any day you like, except tomorrow and Monday,” she replied. “I’ve enjoyed myself very much,” she added, as she held out her hand. “I’m glad you made me go.”
Wolf was on the point of asking her what her engagements were on Sunday and Monday; but he thought better of it in time, and taking off his cap and waving his stick he turned and strode away.
It was very nearly dark when the last little villa on the King’s Barton road was left behind.
He walked slowly forward under a starless sky, revolving his adventure. He recognized clearly enough that his first infatuation had changed its quality not a little. Gerda was now not only a maddeningly desirable girl. She was a girl with a definite personality of her own. That birdlike whistling! Never had he known such a thing was possible! It accounted as nothing else could do for her queer, unembarrassed silences. In fact, it was the expression of her silences—and not only of hers! It was, as he recalled its full effect upon him, the expression of just those mysterious silences in Nature which all his life long he had, so to speak, waited upon and worshipped. That strange whistling was the voice of those green pastures and those blackthorn-hedges, not as they were when human beings were conscious of them, but as they were in that indescribable hour just before dawn, when they awoke in the darkness to hear the faint, faint stirrings—upon the air—of the departing of the nonhuman powers of the night!
He was so absorbed in his thoughts that it was with quite a startled leap of the heart that he became conscious of hurried, uneven steps behind him. What kind of steps were they? They didn’t sound like the steps of a grown-up person—either man or woman—they were so light in the dark road. And yet somehow they didn’t resemble the footsteps of a child. Wolf became aware of an odd feeling of uneasiness. With all his habitual mysticism he was a man little subject to what are called psychic impressions. Yet on this occasion he could not help a somewhat discomfortable beating of his heart. The last thing he desired was to be overtaken by something unearthly on that pleasant Dorset road! Had the extraordinary phenomenon of the girl’s whistling unsettled his nerves more than he realized?
His first simple and cowardly instinct was to quicken his own steps. In fact, it was with a quite definite effort that he prevented himself from setting off at a run! What was it? Who was it? He listened intently as he walked; and this listening in itself induced him to diminish his speed rather than to increase it.
At last the mysterious maker of this uncertain wavering series of footsteps arrived close at his heels.
Wolf swung round, grasping his stick tightly. Nothing on earth could have prevented a certain strained unnaturalness in his voice as he challenged this pursuer.
“Hullo!” he cried.
There was no answer, and the figure came steadily along till it was parallel with him.
Then he did, in a rush of relief, recognize this nightwalker’s identity.
Even in the darkness he recognized that shabby, derelict personality he had seen in the street with Lob Torp the day before. It was the Vicar of King’s Barton!
He was surprised afterwards at this sudden recognition; though it was not the only occasion in his life when he had used a kind of sixth sense.
But whatever may have been its cause, Wolf’s clairvoyance on this occasion was not shared by his overtaker.
“It … is … very … dark … tonight,” said the clergyman, in a voice so husky and hoarse that it resembled the voice attributed to the discomposed visage of the King of Chaos by the poet Milton.
Wolf’s own voice was quite natural now.
“So dark that I took you for some kind of ghost,” he said grimly.
“Hee! Hee! Hee!” The Vicar laughed with the laugh of a man who makes a mechanical, appreciative noise. This hollow sound would doubtless have passed harmlessly enough in the daylight. In the darkness it was ghastly.
“You came up very quickly,” remarked Wolf. “You must be a good walker, Mr. Valley.”
“Who … are … you … if … you … don’t … mind … my … asking?”
“Not at all, Mr. Valley. I am the new secretary at the Squire’s.”
The man stopped dead-still in the road; and, in natural politeness, Wolf stopped too.
“You are … the … other … one … Then … I … must … see you later … I buried him. … I said prayers for him every day … He … was … very kind to me. I must see you … later. …” Having uttered these words, the Vicar seemed to gather up out of the dark some new kind of strength; for he moved forward by Wolf’s side with a firmer step.
For nearly half a mile they walked side by side in silence.
Then the quavering voice out of the obscurity began again.
“Valley … is my name. … You’ve got it quite right. T. E. Valley. … I … drink more than’s good for me. … I’m a little drunk tonight … but you’ll excuse me. In the dark it isn’t noticeable. But you’re quite right. T. E. Valley is quite right. I was in the Eleven at Ramsgard. … I play still. … I play with the boys. …”
Once more there was no sound but that of the two men’s feet in the road and the thud—thud—thud of Wolf’s stick.
Then the voice recommenced. “The poor people here are very kind to me … very kind to T. E. Valley. But for the rest …”
He again stopped dead-still in the road and Wolf stopped with him.
“For the rest … except … Darnley … they are all … You won’t tell them, will you? They are all devils! Devils! Devils!” His voice rose in a kind of helpless fury. Then, after a moment’s pause: “But they can’t hurt T. E. Valley. None of ’em can … drunk or sober … and that’s because I’m God’s Priest in this place. … God’s Priest, Sir! However you like to take it!”
This final outburst seemed to restore the shadowy little man to his senses; for until Wolf brought him to the gate of the Vicarage and bade him farewell there, his words became steadily more coherent—his intonation more normal and more sober.
The door of Pond Cottage was opened for Wolf by Dimity Stone.
“I’ve kept dinner back till it’s as good as ruined,” grumbled the old woman.
“Where are—” Wolf began.
“In there … waiting!” she answered, as she moved off.
He opened the drawing-room door.
“I am so very sorry, Mrs. Otter,” he said humbly.
They all rose from their seats; but it was Jason who spoke first.
“Everything’s only waiting,” he chuckled grimly. “That sofa is a better place for waiting than a headmaster’s study!”
“My son doesn’t mean that you’ve kept us a minute,” said Mrs. Otter. “Dimity’s only just ready. But we’ll sit down at the table while you wash your hands; so that you can feel quite happy.”
“Don’t be long, Solent!” cried Darnley, as Wolf turned to go upstairs. “Mother won’t let us touch a morsel till you come.”
As he entered his bedroom he heard Mrs. Otter’s voice. “Dimity! Dimity! We’re quite ready!” And then, just as he was closing the door, he caught something about “these secretaries” from Jason.