A Game of Bowls
Wolf was compelled that particular afternoon to walk a good deal faster than his wont, to reach the manor-house of King’s Barton in time for his daily labour. But his work itself was, when he did settle down to it, a great deal pleasanter than usual, owing to the absence of Mr. Urquhart from the scene.
He found it extremely agreeable to sit at leisure in that escutcheoned window, one of whose smaller panes opened to the outside air upon such easy and such smoothly-worked hinges as made it a pleasure to open it or shut it.
The purple asters and blue lobelia-borders in the flowerbeds below, had gathered to themselves a much more autumnal atmosphere than when he last observed them. There were more fallen leaves; and upon them, as well as upon the dark velvety grass, he fancied that he could discern the moisture of last night’s dew, giving them that peculiar look for which he had been craving.
The actual work he was engaged on lent itself to the breathless peacefulness of that grey afternoon. He had to take the gnomic commentaries and floating fragments of wicked gossip gathered together by his employer, and translate them into a style that had at least some beauty of its own. This style had been his own contribution to the book; and though it had been evoked under external pressure, and in a sense had been a tour de force, it was in its essence the expression of Wolf’s own soul—the only purely aesthetic expression that Destiny had ever permitted to his deeper nature.
The further he advanced with his book the more interested he became in this aspect of it. He spent hours revising the earlier chapters, written before this style of his had established itself; and he came to value these elaborated pages as things that were precious in themselves—precious independently of whether they were ever printed.
The Cerne Giant was now the subject of his efforts; and his first two renderings seemed to him hopelessly below the level of the rest of his writing.
“She had sat on the knees of the Cerne Giant in her youth, and Sir Walter, robbed of the delectation of prolonged seduction, turned, it seems, in infinite weariness, to the more ambiguous tastes that procured him his famous infamy.”
He put his pen through this and wrote in its place:
“Those long, hot summer afternoons spent by her in gathering devil’s-bit and hawkweed in perilous proximity to that troubling symbol, had seduced her mind long before Sir Walter seduced her body. It was natural enough, therefore, for this corrupt rogue to come soon to prefer—”
Here he laid down his pen and contemplated once more the Squire’s notes, which ran as follows:
“Cerne Giant—real virginity unknown in Dorset—‘cold maids’ a contradiction—Sir Walter’s disgust—His erudition—His platonic tastes—How he was misunderstood by a lewd parson—”
“Good Lord!” said Wolf to himself, “I must be careful what I’m doing just here. The old demon has changed his tune. This isn’t garrulous history. This is special pleading.”
He took up his pen, erased the words “natural enough, therefore, for this corrupt rogue,” and wrote in their place, “natural enough, therefore, for this baffled idolater of innocence to become a misogynist and to turn—” He stopped abruptly, pushed back his manuscript, and stared out of the window. He would have found it hard to explain this pause in his work, but a vague consciousness of the personality of young Redfern took possession of his mind.
“I’ve never seen a line of that fellow’s writing,” he thought. “I wonder what he would have made of this precious Sir Walter?”
The blue lobelias, the dark-green grass-blades leaning sideways against the edge of the brown mould, as if some light faun’s-hoof had trodden them down, came to his consciousness then with such a clear revelation of something in nature purer than anything in man’s mind, that he felt a sense of nausea with regard to these lewd preciosities. What was he doing, to be employed at such a job?
If the book were ever published, none of his own stylistic inventions, such as they were, could offset the general drift of it. And what effect would that drift have? To which side of the gulf between beauty and the opposite of beauty would it draw readers?
Like a drop of ice-cold rain, frozen, accursed, timeless, this abominable doubt fell upon his heart and sank into its depths. The whole subterranean stream of Wolf’s life-illusion had been obsessed, as long as he could remember, by the notion of himself as some kind of a protagonist in a cosmic struggle. He hated the traditional terminology for this primordial dualism; and it was out of his hatred of this, and out of his furtive pride, that he always opposed, in his dialogues with himself, his own secret “mythology” to some equally secret “evil” in the world around him. But because the pressure of circumstances had made him so dependent on Mr. Urquhart’s money, it happened that until this actual moment he had evaded bringing his conscience to bear upon the man’s book, though he had brought it to bear freely enough upon the man himself.
But now—cold, frozen, eternal, malignant—this abominable doubt fell upon him like an accursed rain … drip-drop, drip-drop, drip-drop … each drop sinking out of sight into the dim, unreasoning levels of his being, where it began poisoning the waters.
“How can I struggle with this man when I am exhausting all my ingenuity in trying to make his book an immortal work?” Wolf placed the sheets of his manuscript carefully in order and put a heavy paperweight on the top of them. Then he set himself to curse the obscurity of his universe as he had never done before.
“Good—evil? Evil—good?” he thought. “Why should these old dilemmas rise up now and spoil my life, just as it is rounding itself off into a solid integrity?”
He surveyed the great shelves of Mr. Urquhart’s library much in the same mood as he had recently surveyed the circumvallation-lines of Poll’s Camp. “Come out of your grave, you wretched Redfern!” he cried under his breath. “And let’s hear what you made of it! Was it the drip-drop of this infernal indecision that sent you scampering off to Lenty Pond of an autumn evening? Did you feel a knot in your head, tightening, tightening, tightening?”
The thought came to him then, “Suppose I gave up this whole job?” And the image of his mother seeking refuge with Lord Carfax, of Gerda back again in Torp’s yard, of himself wandering over the world, far removed from Christie, rose sickening, ghastly, before him.
He lifted the paperweight from the pile of manuscript. It had its own interest, this paperweight—a slab of alabaster with a silver eagle upon it. He tilted it up and balanced it sideways, till the eagle looked to him like a fly on a piece of soap.
“Soap?” he thought; and the word put him in mind of what Mr. Urquhart had said about the transfiguration of little things by the decision to commit suicide.
At that moment there was a sharp knock at the door, and Wolf started violently, leaving the paperweight upside-down upon his manuscript.
“Come in!” he cried, in a loud, irritable tone.
The tall figure of Roger Monk entered and walked gravely up to him. It had always been a speculation to Wolf how this great ostler-gardener managed to move so discreetly across these polished floors. The man moved up to him now as if he had been a supernatural messenger walking upon air.
“I came just to tell you, Mr. Solent, Sir,” said Roger Monk, “that there’s a bowling-match goin’ on at Farmer’s Rest. It entered my mind, since Squire’s out to Lovelace’s tonight, ’twould be a sight you might be sorry to miss, Mr. Solent, Sir.”
“Where’s Farmer’s Rest?” enquired Wolf.
“Why, that’s the village pub, Sir! Haven’t you ever been into it, Sir? But I expect it’s out of your way. It’s out of all decent folks’ way, I reckon. ’Tis down Lenty Lane, Pond Lane, and Dead Badger Lane. ’Tis no great way; and I’m thinking of going round there myself. So if it’s no offense, Mr. Solent, Sir, I thought as maybe ye’d like to have my company.”
He stopped, and in the manner of the discreet servant of a wilful master stared impassively at the wall till his gentleman made his decision.
“I’d like to come with you very much, Roger,” Wolf replied. “But what about tea? I was thinking of dropping in at Pond Cottage.”
“Don’t do that, Sir. Come, as I’m telling ’ee, to Farmer’s Rest and I’ll see to it myself that Miss Bess’ll give you as good a cup o’ tea, and a better, too, than ye’d ever get from that old Dimity’s kitchen. Not but what things be much more decent-like down there, since Miss Smith be living with ’em.”
“How does Dimity put up with Miss Smith, Roger?” enquired Wolf slyly.
“Past all expectancy, Mr. Solent,” replied the other. “But she’s a real lady, that young woman, whoever her Dad were.”
“Why, wasn’t Mr. Smith her father, then?”
Roger Monk winked slyly.
“There be as says he weren’t, Sir. But if you don’t mind, Mr. Solent, we’d best be getting along, down-village.”
He moved towards the door as he spoke, and Wolf got up and followed him.
Lenty Lane and Pond Lane were familiar enough, though under that grey windless sky they assumed the kind of expression that Wolf always imagined such places to assume when some disturbing human event was impending; but Dead Badger Lane led him to completely new ground. It was narrower than either of the others and very much overgrown with grass. This grass grew long and rank on both sides of deep cart-tracks, and amid its greenness there were patches of scabious and knapweed.
“Who’s playing in this bowling-match?” Wolf asked, wondering vaguely what there was about these patches of country weeds that made him think of a certain dusty road beyond the railway-station at Weymouth. “Beyond the backwater it was, too,” he said to himself.
“Mr. Malakite from Blacksod, Sir, be playing against our Mr. Valley. … And I be playing myself, Sir,” the man added, after a pause, in a deprecatory tone.
Wolf prodded the cart-track with his stick, and, unseen by his companion, pulled down the corners of his mouth and worked the muscles of his under-jaw.
“Whom are you playing against?” enquired Wolf in a politely negligent tone.
The man gave him a quick glance.
“Hope ’tis no offense to name the party, Sir, but I be playing against your Missus’s Dad.”
“Against Mr. Torp?” cried Wolf, feeling that the situation in front of him was growing thicker with discomfort every moment.
“None other, Sir. The old gentleman be the best hand at bowls, when ’ee be sober, if I may say so, that they have anywhere down these ways. I learned the game myself”—these last words were spoken with extraordinary impressiveness—“in the Shires.”
Farmer’s Rest turned out to be a small, whitewashed, thatched cottage, not very well kept up, and displaying no sign, as far as Wolf could see, of its professional use. The place was open and they stepped inside.
They were confronted by a narrow passageway leading into a garden at the back; and there, framed by an open door, he could see the bowling-green, with groups of grave men moving solemnly across it in their shirtsleeves.
The public bar was on his right, the private parlour on his left; and into this latter room he was ushered by the tall gardener.
“One minute, Sir, and I’ll fetch Miss Bess. I expect some of the other gentlemen will be glad to have a cup of tea. Her name is Round, Sir, if you don’t mind. Miss Elizabeth Round.”
Wolf sat down and waited. Sure enough, in about five minutes a pretty young woman, plump and rosy-cheeked, but in some odd way vacant-looking, brought in a tea-tray and placed it on the table.
Wolf was completely nonplussed by the personality of Miss Round. Superficially she looked clean, fresh, amiable, and a little stupid; but all her movements possessed a queer, automatic quality that made him slightly uncomfortable. He couldn’t define it at once; but after watching her carefully for a short space, he came to the conclusion that she was like a pretty doll, or a human mannequin, wound up to perform a given task, but lacking all interior consciousness of what she was doing.
“Mr. Malakite sends his compliments, Sir,” she said, “and he hopes to have the honour of a cup of tea with you in a minute. He’s just finishing his game.”
“Don’t hurry him. I’ll be all right,” murmured Wolf. “Is your father the landlord here?” This he added rather lamely, as she proceeded with rapid movements of her plump hands to arrange the tea-things on the table.
Miss Bess nodded. “He’s not Dad,” she replied calmly. “He’s uncle. Dad’s been gone for years.”
Whether she meant that Mr. Round, for reasons of his own, had bolted, or whether she meant that he was dead, Wolf could not tell. His interest in Miss Bess was faint; in her father, dead or alive, fainter still. His heart was beating at that moment for quite another cause. His glance, fixed upon the door into the passage, kept visualizing the bookseller’s grizzled head. His ears strained themselves to catch the sound of the old man’s voice.
But for several seconds all he could hear was the knocking of the bowls against one another on the grass outside.
Then he became aware of quite a different sound, a sound that apparently proceeded from above the ceiling of the private parlour. He glanced at Miss Bess, and, to his surprise, she promptly raised a plump finger and pressed it against her lips.
“It’s uncle,” she whispered. “He’s heard a strange voice and it’s set him off.”
Wolf and Miss Bess both concentrated their attention upon this new sound. It was a thick human voice, repeating over and over again the same two syllables.
“Jesus … Jesus … Jesus … Jesus.”
“Is he ill? Is he suffering? Don’t let me keep you if you ought to go up to him.”
Miss Bess removed her fingers from her mouth and smiled a little.
“Oh, it’s all right now,” she declared calmly. “It’s your voice that started him. He knows every noise for yards and yards round this house. Dogs, cats, pigs, poultry, pigeons, horses, cattle. There isn’t a sound he doesn’t know. He’ll know who’s won this match o’ bowls afore I tells him a thing.”
The voice above the ceiling continued its refrain.
“Jesus … Jesus … Jesus … Jesus.”
“That’s how he goes on—sometimes for hours. But us who knows him takes no stock in that. Now, if I’d heard him starting off on God, same as he does sometimes, you’d have seen me running upstairs like greased lightning! It’s all as how he gets started. Whichever way he starts he keeps it up till he’s tired. Funny, isn’t it? But no one knows what human nature can come to, till ye’ve seen it and heard it.”
“Does he say ‘God’ over and over again in this same way?”
Miss Bess nodded. “It’s then I’ve got to run! It’s always the same. I used to let him do it; but one day they found him in a ditch, eating frog-spawn. The ditch were over Lenty-way. I expect you’ve often seen it. It’s where them mare’s-tails grows. He had to be pulled out. That were one of his ‘God’ days.”
Once more Wolf strained his ears; and, mingled with the clicking of the bowls outside, came that repeated “Jesus … Jesus … Jesus … Jesus” from above the ceiling.
“He’ll go to sleep, present; and by suppertime he’ll be gay as a lark. It’s our Mr. Valley taught him what to do. ‘When you feel God coming,’ Mr. Valley said to him, ‘don’t get flustered or anything. Just say “Jesus” and you’ll go to sleep like a newborn babe!’ ”
“What’s the matter with him?” enquired Wolf. The girl fetched a blue tea-cosy from the recesses of a cupboard and pulled it down carefully over the teapot. Then she raised her eyes and looked straight at her guest; and for the flicker of a second her brisk, automatic personality displayed the troubled awareness of a conscious soul.
“Worried,” she said simply. And then, in the old automatic way: “Excuse me, Sir. There’s someone in the bar.” And with all the fresh, stupid innocence of her first entrance upon the scene, she hurried across the passage.
Wolf surveyed the admirable preparations for tea that lay spread before him. There were two teacups, two knives, two plates, and two chairs.
“Jesus … Jesus … Jesus … Jesus.”
“What on earth shall I talk about with the old man?” he thought. “I wish he’d hurry up. This tea will have stood much too long.”
He had not long to wait. There were shuffling steps in the passage, and the bookseller came in. Wolf rose and shook him by the hand.
“Just in time, Mr. Malakite,” he said. “I was afraid our tea would get too strong.”
The two men sat down opposite each other, and Wolf, removing the blue cosy, filled both their cups and handed the bookseller the bread-and-butter.
“I hope you’re ahead in your game,” he said emphatically. “It must be an absorbing game, bowls. It must be one of the most absorbing of all.”
Mr. Malakite put down his cup and moved a long, slender forefinger round its rim.
“Your father and I had many a game on this green,” he said, without raising his eyes.
And Wolf looked at Mr. Malakite with as many confused feelings as he had ever experienced in the presence of one human head. He thought to himself, “Was the man ever ashamed of that white beard when he saw himself in the looking-glass, as he went up to wash his hands between dusting his books and sneaking into his girl’s room?”
“You and my father, Mr. Malakite,” he said in a low tone, “must have seen quite a lot of each other in those old days.”
“One more cup, if you please, Sir. A lot of each other? Well—no. He was a gentleman, you see; and I’ve never been anything but a tradesman. But still … in a manner of speaking, we were friends, I suppose.”
He lifted his eyes now, and Wolf was surprised by the devouring intensity of their gaze. It was a fixed, monomaniacal intensity, and it seemed addressed to no particular object. It was impossible to imagine it softening into tenderness, or abandoned to humour, or melting in grief. It did not seem adapted to looking into human eyes. It seemed directed towards some aspect of universal matter that absorbed and fascinated it. It seemed, so to speak, to eat the air. Mr. Malakite himself appeared apprehensive of the effect of his gaze upon his interlocutor; for he lowered his eyelids directly his words were out of his mouth, and once more began following the rim of his teacup with the tip of his finger.
“I know that look,” thought Wolf. “I’ve seen it on the streets in London and I’ve seen it on the esplanade at Weymouth. It’s like the passion of a miser. It’s horrible, but it’s not contemptible.”
“Had you many friends in common?” enquired Wolf; and as he spoke, he leant across the table, and, without waiting this time for any request, filled up the old man’s cup to the very brim and placed the milk-jug at his side.
“I can’t stand that finger-game of his!” he said to himself. “He’ll have to stop doing that if he’s going to drink his tea.”
But not at all! Mr. Malakite bent his furrowed head, but keeping his gaze discreetly lowered, once more commenced circling the vessel’s rim with the extreme tip of his long finger.
“Friends in common?” the old man repeated. “You mean, I suppose, Mr. Solent, to ask whether your father and I had any peculiarities in common? That’s a natural question, and if I knew you better I think I could interest you a good deal in answering it. But we don’t know each other well enough, Sir … not nearly well enough. Besides”—and once more Wolf got the benefit of that fixed, monomaniacal gaze—“I don’t approve of exposing a father to his son. It’s an impiety, an impiety!”
Wolf finished his tea in silence after this, and handed Mr. Malakite a cigarette. When they were both smoking, and Wolf, at any rate, was enjoying that faint rarification of human thought, like the distilling of an essence, which tea-drinking can induce, he asked Mr. Malakite with grave directness what was the matter with the landlord of Farmer’s Rest.
The bookseller’s forehead knit in an unpleasant scowl.
“Been hearing him, I suppose? Nobody bothers about him, Mr. Solent. Miss Elizabeth is the boss here, and she don’t like people who talk too much about family-matters. Why should she? Round’s her uncle, not yours or mine.”
The brutality of this remark destroyed in a moment all the fragrant clarity of Wolf’s after-tea sensations. He received the sort of shock from it that always made him seem to himself a priggish fool, devoid of the degree of humorous toughness which this world requires. At the same time it stirred up all his ill-balanced impulses with regard to persecuted people—impulses that led him to a morbid exaggeration of this particular aspect of life.
He began to indulge in the wildest imaginings about the “worried” Mr. Round; and he obstinately returned to the subject.
“Has this fellow up there,” he said uneasily, jerking his thumb towards the ceiling, “lived in King’s Barton long?”
But Mr. Malakite rose from his chair.
“Come out and see the game, Sir, won’t you? There are people everywhere about us whose existence is no affair of ours. To fuss over them like this clergyman here does is only to share their disease.”
“What disease are you talking about, Mr. Malakite?” asked Wolf, as he followed him into the garden.
The sight of the group of men gathered there so disturbed his attention that he could not be quite sure whether he caught correctly the malignant mumbling that issued from his companion’s lips. “The disease of Life!” was what it sounded like.
A little later, as he watched the bookseller calculating with exquisite nicety the “bias” of his particular bowl, he was conscious of a desire not to encounter again for some while the expression of those deep-sunken eyes.
“What does that look of his make me think of?” he wondered, as he nodded to the other players and their absorbed spectators. And it seemed to him that he recalled a sombre lightship that he had seen once in Portland harbour, which every now and then emitted a long, thin stream of ghastly, livid illumination from the midst of waters desolate and disturbed.
There had apparently been time, while Wolf was having his tea, for Roger Monk to defeat Mr. Torp; for that champion, still in his shirtsleeves, and extremely hot, was arguing in a plaintive voice with Mr. Valley as to what he might have done and didn’t do.
Wolf shook hands with Mr. Valley and commiserated his father-in-law on his defeat. “It’s a wonder I didn’t lose a lot of money over you,” he said facetiously. “I backed you to the limit to beat our friend Roger, for the honour of the family; and now you’ve let us all down, and the West Country too! Mr. Monk, so he tells me, comes from the Shires.”
“Shires be damned, Mr. Solent!” said the monument-maker. “ ’Tweren’t no shires! ’Twere me wone bloody cussedness. If I’d ’a known then what I do know now, ’twould be he and me”—he nodded in the direction of Mr. Malakite—“and not he and him, for this here final.”
“How is it that you got knocked out so soon, Valley?” enquired Wolf.
But the little clergyman made a sign with his hand, and advanced a step or two, intent with all his mind and soul on Roger Monk’s massive wrist and the bowl which he was poising.
Wolf had to content himself, therefore, with drawing back his father-in-law to a bench under the hedge, where the game could be watched and Mr. Torp’s lamentations listened to in comparative ease and comfort.
“What’s wrong with this Mr. Round?” He hadn’t intended to say anything like this when he searched about in his mind for a suitable topic; but the words rose to his lips as if from some inquisitive demon pricking up its ears in the pit of his stomach.
“Can’t forgive ’isself, I reckon, for they things he said about young Redfern. ’Twere summat o’ that, so folks do tell I, what stole the heart out o’ that young gentleman and made ’un turn to the wall. Leastways there were some folks as told ’un ’twere what he did say, down here, at Farmer’s Rest bar, that turned that young man’s poor heart to stone. ’Twould have jostled me wone innards, I tell ’ee, if any well-thought-of landlord spoke such words of I.”
“What did he say about Redfern?” enquired Wolf, suppressing the absurd image that rose in his mind of a Mr. Torp lacerated by moral disquietude.
His father-in-law, however, at that moment saw fit to display a revived interest in the game of bowls.
“Look-see!” he cried, tapping Wolf on the knee, and leaning forward. “By jiggers, if that girt flunkey from up at House aren’t making Mr. Malakite look like nothing!”
Wolf had indeed for some while been admiring the steady play of the big gardener. The old man opposed to him seemed on the contrary to be growing less and less careful of his aim.
“Something’s fretting that wold gent, looks so,” went on Mr. Torp. “Miss Bess been showing her laces to he, in parlour, like enough! ’Tis a wonderful disposing of Providence, Mr. Solent, when old men can flutter young ladies and make their hands fidget. ’Tis not been allowed to I, such privileges and portions. And yet I be a man, I reckon, what knows the road royal as well as another!”
But Wolf’s mind was still hovering about Mr. Round and his remarkable “worries.”
“What did this man actually say about Redfern?” he repeated.
Mr. Torp turned his head slowly towards him. “It may be a good world,” he remarked sententiously, “and it may be a bad world, but it’s the world; and us has got to handle ’un with eyes in our heads for landslides. My job mayn’t be the job you’d choose. It mayn’t be the job I’d choose, if others offered. But it’s my job. And anyone, Mr. Solent, with a job like mine can’t afford to stir up trouble among they dead. I were the man who made the headstone for’n. I ask ’ee, should I go spreading trouble about thik quiet lad? They said, when his funeral-day came, that he’d got no relation to mourn for’n. Who, then, I ask ’ee, Mr. Solent, is to hold their tongue, i’ the peace of God, about the poor young man, if it bain’t me wone self, who chipped the stone what covers him?”
“Is it true, when his conscience troubles him, that Mr. Round wanders about that field where Lenty Pond is?”
“Never ye mind where ’a wanders, Mr. Solent! Nebuchadnezzar were more than he; for kings be more than publicans; and he went on all fours in’s day.”
His father-in-law’s poetic prevarications had begun to irritate Wolf.
“I wish you’d tell your wife, Mr. Torp,” he burst out, “not to let Lobbie bathe in that damned pond!”
The monument-maker gave a start and opened his eyes wide. Wolf’s intonation evidently surprised him.
He smiled as he answered.
“She not let him bathe? She don’t let him do nothing—not even breathe, I fancy! ’Twould be somebody very different from our Gerda’s Mummy, Mr. Solent, what would make Lob Torp bide at whoam. But what ails ’ee, Sir, to speak with such disturbance of a good Darset duck-pond, such as I do mind sliding on, winter come winter, since I were slim as a lath? What’s Lenty Pond done to thee, Sir? ’Tis no girt place for perch or pike; and to my belief no wild-geese ever settled on it; but ’tis a good pond. ’Tis a pond that would drown the likes of you and me, maybe. But they boys! Why, they’d bathe in Satan’s spittle and come out sweet. Lenty Pond’s nothing to Lob Torp, Sir! You can rest peaceful on that.”
As Wolf listened to all this, with one eye on the final defeat of Mr. Malakite, and the other on the doll-like briskness of Bess Round, who was now bringing out into the garden more chairs and more tables, he began to be aware of a very odd fancy, which he found it impossible to take seriously, and yet impossible to get rid of.
The fancy had to do with Lenty Pond; and the more he thought of it, the more ridiculously it pressed upon him. It was as if every single person in these three Dorset towns were hiding from him something they knew about Lenty Pond, something that was absurdly simple, that fitted together with mathematical precision, but to which he was himself completely blind.
He got up from the bench and went across the grass, with the intention of congratulating Roger Monk on his victory. On his way, however, and before his approach was detected by the gardener, round whose tall figure all the villagers who had been watching the match were now gathered, he caught sight of Miss Bess ushering into the garden the two Otter brothers.
Towards these two men he directed his steps, leaving Mr. Torp to join the loquacious group in the centre of the bowling-green. As he shook hands with the brothers, he detected Mr. Malakite secretively shuffling off by the elbow of Miss Bess, who, with a tray of empty bottles, was returning into the house.
That disconcerting feeling, as though the whole of his life at the present moment were unreal, weighed upon him still. It hung upon him like a wavering dizziness, as full of meaningless blotches and sparkles as the glass coffin-lid of King Aethelwolf in the Abbey.
Even as he was describing to the two Otters the portion of the bowling-match that he had seen, his eyes remained fixed on a particularly smooth and delicately polished bowl, of a dark-chestnut colour, that lay on the grass close to Darnley’s feet.
It seemed to him as if he were reading his fate on the polished surface of this object, a fate laborious, complicated, burdened, but at the same time rolled and tossed about at random by many alien hands! Was there any portion of his identity, compact, self-contained, weighted with inward intention, like the “bias” of this bowl?
As he went on talking to the two brothers, he became aware that a small flower-seed had balanced itself, in its aimless flight, on the bowl at Darnley’s feet, and he began to feel as if this flower-seed were tickling the skin of his mind, and that he couldn’t brush it away. Something was fretting him; something was teasing him. What was it?
Then quite suddenly he knew what it was. It was the memory of old Malakite’s obsessed expression—that expression of concentrated erotic insanity, directed toward universal matter, as he had caught it from under the man’s wrinkled forehead across the blue tea-cosy. This, then, was why he was answering Jason’s remarks in so perfunctory a manner! Then he gave a quick sigh of irrepressible relief; for he became aware that the doll-like young lady was back again at their side, suggesting that they should all sit down before a rickety garden-table upon which she had placed a fresh tray of mugs.
This they proceeded to do; and while she was supplying them with foaming pints of Dorchester ale, he heard her say to Darnley: “Mr. Malakite’s just traipsed off. He made his little joke, like he always does, the funny old man; but anyone could see he weren’t best pleased! ’Tis hard for him, I expect, to be beat like this by a fellow who, as you might say, is a foreigner in these parts. He’s been playing on this green, that old gentleman, as long as I can mind anything, and there be few enough who’ve got the best of him!”
She moved away to persuade the winner of the match and his rustic admirers to gather about another wooden table, leaving the “gentry” to their own devices.
Then it was that Wolf’s mind completely recovered from its sense of unreality and from its hallucinations about Lenty Pond. From where he lay in a creaky straw-plaited chair between Darnley and Jason, he could take in at his leisure the whole characteristic West Country scene. There was a relaxed jocularity about the men’s voices, as they rose in that shadowy garden, between the tall privet-hedge and the sloping thatched roof, that seemed to contain within it all the rich apple-juices that were ripening in the orchards around them, all the cool sap of the mangelwurzel plants in the neighbouring fields, the good white heart of billions of ears of plump wheat-sheaves, awaiting their threshing-day in all the granaries between Parret and Stour!
The sky, as he watched it above that privet-hedge, was still of the same filmy greyness as when he had sat, some five or six hours ago, under the sycamore at Poll’s Camp; but the gathered volume of masculine personalities, as it surrounded him now—for Miss Bess was the only woman on the scene, and her femininity seemed to have no more weight in it than petticoats on a clothesline—seemed fast building up about him a sort of battlemented watchtower, from the isolation and protection of which his days began to fall into a measured, reasonable order, such as he had not known for many a long week.
That chestnut-coloured polished bowl was still within his vision on the smooth turf; but at this moment, in place of giving him a sense of random helplessness, it gave him a sense of reassured control. In this pleasant retreat, with the fumes of the Dorchester ale mounting into his head, he began to feel his hand firm and unbewildered once more upon his life’s rudder.
These worthy men, with their work behind them, seemed to have eluded by some secret pressure of their united force the splash and beat of nature’s chaotic waves. They seemed to have dragged their “hollow ship” out of the tide that summer afternoon—up, up, up some hidden shelving beach, where all agitations were over.
Everything disturbing and confusing sank away out of sight for Wolf just then. Indeed, his whole life gathered itself together with lovely inevitableness, as if it were a well-composed story that he himself, long ago and time out of mind, had actually composed.
And by degrees while he lazily drank his ale and chatted with Darnley—for Jason had for some unknown reason become suddenly silent—the old fighting-spirit of his inborn life-illusion rose strong and upwelling within him.
And there came to him the vision of one particular rock-pool near Weymouth, to which he had once found his way. He saw the rose-tinged seaweeds sway backwards and forwards … he heard the crying of the gulls. …
Oh, that it were possible to gather together a great handful of such memories and pour them forth out of his cupped hands into the brain above that face on the Waterloo steps! But—but what if there should arrive a day, when, by the turning of the terrible engines, he himself should look like that face, while some other Wolf, drinking ale on a bowling-green, indulged in benevolent emotions in a creaky wicker-chair?
“Are you sure you couldn’t come back to dinner with us, Solent?” said Darnley at last, in a pause in the midst of their rambling conversation.
“Impossible!” he said, looking at his watch. “It’s seven o’clock now. As it is, I shall be late for Gerda’s supper.”
And then he suddenly remembered that Gerda’s last words to him had been: “Don’t hurry back, Wolf, I like waiting for you. I like sitting at the window and doing nothing. That’s what I like best of all!”
“Those girls of yours will be very annoyed if you don’t come,” said Jason.
“Why, they don’t expect me, do they? Your mother doesn’t expect me, does she?”
“All women,” said Jason, with a chuckle, his spirits reviving when he saw Wolf’s discomfort and indecision, “expect all men!”
“Well, I must come another time,” said Wolf. “I can’t leave Gerda like that without telling her. But I hope ‘my girls,’ as you call them, are all right? I hope you don’t find Olwen too much of a handful?”
“Darnley is the one to give advice. Do you think he’d better go home, Darnley; or do you think he’d better come to dinner with us?”
“He must suit himself,” said Darnley smiling. “I wouldn’t care about leaving Gerda alone if I were in his shoes. But then, I’ve never had a Gerda … and am never likely to have!”
Mr. Valley at this point drifted up to their table.
“I’ve got to be getting back now,” he said. “Are any of you people coming, or are you going to stay longer?”
The three men all rose. “We were just talking of getting off,” said Darnley. “I suppose we all go the same way? At the start, anyhow?”
He beckoned to Bess Round to come to their table, and, drawing a small leather purse out of his pocket, paid for all the drinks they had had except Mr. Valley’s. Him Roger Monk had already treated and treated well.
Wolf went across the grass and said goodbye to Mr. Torp and to Roger Monk, congratulating the latter warmly on his victory.
“I’ve never known the old man to play so badly,” said Monk, with a deprecatory shrug of his shoulders. “That cup of tea he had with you in the parlour, Sir, must have gone to his head.”
“Give me little darter me love, Mr. Solent,” said the monument-maker. “And you may kiss she, too, if ye be so minded, from her old Dad. Not that they turns aught but cold maids’ cheeks to their Dad’s kisses. But that be all the better for thee, Sir; and ye are more like to mind me message than if ’t had been any o’ the young gents here assembled.”
Roger Monk’s victory at bowls had been celebrated by such copious libations that the gardener had no hesitation now about indulging in a piece of ribaldry from which in more sober mood he would certainly have refrained.
“Young and old is the same to that gender—eh, Mr. Solent, Sir? That’s what we servants know, maybe, better than you gentlemen. There’s not a poor one among that gender, nor a rich one among ’em—eh, Mr. Torp?—that hasn’t wished themselves in the bed of somebody that isn’t their law-established.”
Wolf went off down Dead Badger Lane side by side with Jason, while Darnley walked in front of them with Mr. Valley.
That remark of Roger Monk teased Wolf’s mind. The man had worded it in a coarser, drier, cruder manner than such a thing would have been worded by a man of the West Country. The use of the word “gender,” for instance, “That’s a touch of Sheffield or Birmingham,” thought Wolf. And perhaps just because of its coarse wording, the thing hit Wolf with a most unpleasant emphasis. What would he feel if there were any serious cause for his being jealous? What he did feel at that moment was an actual sense of physical nausea caused by Roger’s words. It wasn’t only Gerda. That use of the word “gender” seemed to have stripped the world of a certain decency that belonged to its inherent skin quite as much as to its external conventions.
He experienced at that moment a wave of positive hatred for Roger Monk. “He looked as if he might put his hand on my shoulder or even slap me on the back. There’s something horrible about a male servant … especially a big male servant … when he drops his professional discretion. … I could find it in me to pity even Mr. Urquhart if this chap does ever turn on him!”
His thoughts were jerked back into focus and into the cart-ruts of Dead Badger Lane by a remark from Jason Otter.
“Look at those two, in front there! Your friend Darnley has no more idea of what Valley’s after, than that stick of yours has! I suppose you think that Darnley’s very clever and very gentlemanly. That’s what most people think. It’s all his politeness. Look at their two heads now, bobbing up and down under their hats! I think cows and sheep are better than human beings. Nicer, I mean. Cleaner, too. Cleaner and nicer. What’s wrong with human beings is their minds. Their minds are filthy. The minds of worms are much nicer. Have you ever thought about what really goes on in people’s heads? I suppose not. I never thought you really knew very much. You’re good at writing histories of a lot of bawdy idiots; and you’re good at keeping old Urquhart in a good temper. But I’ve been thinking about you all this afternoon, Solent, and though you’ll probably abuse me for telling you the truth, I think you’re a crazy fool.”
By this time it began to dawn upon Wolf that Jason had no more power of drinking Dorchester ale with impunity than had his bête noire Roger Monk. He tried to distract the poet’s attention from personalities by remarking on the insubstantiality and ghostliness of the elm-trees in the hedges. But Jason refused to show any interest in the beauty of that August night.
“Your friend Darnley,” he now began again, “believes in politeness. He thinks he can smooth everything down by that. He doesn’t know what he’s got against him.”
“What has he got against him?” enquired Wolf, wondering at the back of his mind what effect upon this “politeness” the presence of Mattie in Pond Cottage had been having of late.
The reply of Jason was so violent and so abrupt that it had an uncanny effect upon the placidity of those vaporous elm-trees.
“He’s got God against him!” cried the poet. “What he tries to smooth down are the porcupine-quills of God!”
“We’d better walk a little faster,” said Wolf. “They’ll be turning soon, and I’ve got to go the other way.”
“You’re always on the walk, Solent. Walking here, walking there! You’ll walk into a pit one day, with that stick of yours.”
But Wolf lifted his voice.
“Darnley!” he shouted. “Valley! Wait a minute, you two!”
He could see the figures in front of him turn and stand still.
“Your friends over there will say good night to you, Solent. Were you afraid they wouldn’t? They’ll say good night. All the world over people say good night. They think it does something, I suppose. I don’t know what it does!”
Wolf could not repress a heavy sigh. For some reason or other the peculiar nature of this man’s pessimism began to affect him as if he had been forced, till his hands were weary, to push away great stalks of deadly nightshade.
Jason caught this sigh upon the air, and it seemed to change his mood.
“I expect, Solent, you poor old devil, that that young lady of yours doesn’t cook a good meal for you very often.”
“Oh, yes, she does, Otter!” replied Wolf, as jocosely as he could. “There’s hardly a day we don’t have meat. But to tell you the truth, I’ve been thinking of giving up eating that sort of thing ever since Miss Gault talked to me the other night.”
“Do you attend to anything that an ugly old woman like that says to you? She only wants to stir things up, because she’s never slept with a man.”
The unkindness of those blunt words roused sheer anger in Wolf.
“Sleeping with people isn’t everything in this world, Otter! It isn’t even especially wonderful. I should have thought that being a poet you’d know that, and wouldn’t go putting such importance on these material accidents!”
His anger, as he recognized clearly enough, was due to the fact that his own erotic feelings were so divided just then. But the tone of his voice was so vibrant with irritation, that its electric current conveyed itself to Jason in a second.
They were now quite close upon the others, however; and there was no time for anything but a swift, bitter, malicious blow, aimed where the opponent was most vulnerable.
“You’ll walk into a material accident that’ll stir your quills, master,” the poet growled, “though you do think yourself a sort of superior being going about among ordinary people. You’ll walk into the wood where they pick up horns … clever though you may be!”
The altercation subsided as swiftly as it had risen.
“I didn’t want to lose sight of you,” said Wolf, “because our ways divide in a minute. I wish you’d won that match, Valley, instead of Monk. I can’t tell why, but there was something about Monk that annoyed me this afternoon. Perhaps servants are always annoying when they’re neither one thing nor the other.”
“I hope you didn’t bring me into your quarrel,” said Jason Otter.
“I’m not as good as any of them,” replied Mr. Valley. “Even Torp is better than I am. I never allow enough room for the swing of the bias.”
The four men walked on together and soon reached the spot where Dead Badger Lane joined Pond Lane.
“Well, good night,” said Wolf. “You and I will be seeing each other on Monday, eh, Darnley? Won’t you come back to lunch with me then? I’ll tell Gerda if you will; and we’ll celebrate the beginning of term with some sort of feast.”
“Don’t get anything out of the way for me, Wolf,” the other replied. “You know what I’m like—the most irritating kind of guest. But I’d love to come. It’ll make Monday less of a burden to look forward to.” He stopped short and then suddenly added. “If it wouldn’t be a bother to Gerda, I wish you’d really make it a bit of an occasion and ask little Christie? I’ve had an idea for the last few weeks … in fact since Olwen came to us … that she wanted cheering up. But don’t say anything if it would be too much for Gerda.”
“But, Darnley … you and I know … everyone knows … that Christie never goes out anywhere.”
“Ask her, my dear man, that’s all! I daresay she won’t come, but ask her!” He paused for a second. “Everyone likes to be asked,” he added gravely.
“Hee! Hee! Hee!”
Wolf swung round. It was Jason chuckling like a goblin in the darkness.
But Mr. Valley threw in his word before the electric current of irritation that still connected the two men’s minds had time to explode.
“Let’s see,” said Mr. Valley. “It’s Friday today, isn’t it? Don’t forget, all of you, that next Wednesday is our School-Treat. It begins at two and goes on till seven. The Squire always comes after tea to watch the sports; so I shall expect you with him, Solent. But tell Gerda I want her to come too. Lobbie will be there, and our friend Weevil’s sure to come.”
A muffled chuckle became audible.
“What’s the matter with you, Jason?” expostulated Darnley. “We all enjoy Valley’s school-treats. Are you going to have the Kingsbury band over here again?” he added, turning to the clergyman. “What a time we had last year! They wouldn’t stop, Solent, until it was pitch-dark. When we did get ’em off, they played the Kingsbury jig out there in Lenty Lane, till Roger Monk hit the drummer into the ditch.”
“It was honest of him to do that,” said Jason. “We all know why these lecherous young men want the Kingsbury jig. It would be a good thing if your friend Solent used his stick for these young dogs, instead of boasting how many miles he can walk.”
“Well, I’m going to walk now, anyway,” broke in Wolf, making a violent effort to keep his temper. “Good night, Valley! Good night Darnley! …”
He found it impossible to think of anything, either good or bad, except imaginary retorts to Jason, as he made his way westward through that hushed night. The mere fact that Jason had the power to annoy him so much increased his aggravation; and his inability to lay his finger on the exact nature of this power added the last sharp prod to his irritated spirit.
“I wonder if I am the conceited fool he thinks me? Well! I don’t care if I am. I have my ‘mythology,’ anyway. He’s got the terrible instincts of a child in these things,” his thoughts ran on. “He’s so appallingly direct.”
He meditated for about a quarter of an hour upon Jason’s personality; while the man’s taunt about his fondness for walking and his fondness for his stick took the heart out of every stride he made.
“What really rouses me,” he thought presently, “is his desire to annoy. People can get angry with anyone and say outrageous things. But this is different. He wants to make me feel a fool. He wants to take the life out of my life.”
Then Wolf set himself to wonder as to why it was that his mysterious psychic struggle with the Squire left him so free from personal hostility; while in the case of Jason he actually felt a longing to be wrestling with him in that very ditch into which he had said it was “honest” of Monk to hit the Kingsbury drummer!
“It’s because he knows by some childish instinct just where my life-illusion is weakest. It’s because he sees this weak spot, like a raw scratch in the hide of a bear tied to a pole, and it somehow gets on his nerves, so that he wants to poke at it.”
With this hypothesis in his mind he advanced yet another quarter of a mile between the high hedges, where great bunches of old-man’s-beard made large whitish blurs against the darkness. The trunks of the elms looked now, as he passed them by, as if they were composed of a vaporous stuff that was absolutely liquid. But he hated to see this particular effect, because it made him think of his recent attempts to distract Jason from poking at the spot in his life’s conceit where the skin was so tender.
“That is what it is,” he thought. Jason has deliberately stripped himself of every consolatory self-protective skin. He must see life continually as we others only see it when our life-illusions are broken through. The point is, “is life what Jason sees, or is it what we see?”
Trailing his oak-stick now, instead of prodding the ground with it, Wolf lurched forward in that fluid grey-coloured darkness, as if he’d been some forlorn Homeric ghost whose body had been left unburied.
“It can’t be as he sees it,” he thought, “except to him … except to him!”
He now stood stock-still, his stick just held, but no more than just held, from falling to the ground.
“I refuse to believe,” he said to himself, “and I never will believe, until the day Nature kills me, that there’s such a thing as ‘reality,’ apart from the mind that looks at it! Jason’s stripping himself bare is his way … that’s all … what he sees when he’s like that is no less of an illusion than what I see when I’m plastered with armour. The ‘thing in itself’ is as fluid and malleable as these trees … I’m a sharded beetle and he’s one of those naked little green things that live in the centre of cuckoo-spit!”
This comparison cheered Wolf’s mind a good deal; and his fingers tightened once more upon the handle of his stick. “These trees, this old-man’s-beard, these dark ditch-plants … they all see what they’ve the nature to see. … No living thing has ever seen reality as it is in itself. By God! there’s probably nothing to see, when you come to that!”
He heard at that moment a slight, dry rustling in the grass by the side of the road. Inquisitive to know what it was, he went over, and, stooping down, fumbled with his hand among the entangled weeds. A scent of camomile hit his nostrils; but then—with an exclamation of distress—he drew his hand away.
“Damn!” he exclaimed. “Thorns!” And he thought vaguely, “How odd that there should be a bramble-bush so low down!”
Once more he heard the rustling; and once more, though with more caution, he stretched out his hand. This time he knew what it was; and repressing an instinct to hook the hedgehog with the handle of his stick and drag it out into the road, he straightened his own back and walked on.
“Another version of reality!” he said to himself. “And a bit more armoured even than mine!” And then he remembered what Jason had said with regard to the prickly quills of God. “I must tell him about this hedgehog,” he thought. “It’s just the sort of thing that’ll please him, especially as it’s made my finger bleed.”
The notion of communicating this occurrence with self-depreciatory humour to the “Slowworm of Lenty” completed his restoration to good spirits. By the little device of seeing himself in a humorous and yet not in a ridiculous light, he crossed the moat that separated him from his accustomed stronghold, and pulled up the drawbridge after him.
“I’ll tell him about the hedgehog on Wednesday,” he thought, “when I meet him at the school-treat.” And thinking of Jason’s goblinish laughter when he should be telling him the tale, Wolf entirely forgot the sensations he had recently received from that same sound.
With a mind once more adjusted and fortified to deal with existence, he advanced rapidly towards the outskirts of Blacksod. He knew every mark, every sign of the way as he came along. In a darkness far deeper than this darkness he would have known them, those grotesque and insignificant little things that arrest a person’s attention for so many unknown reasons, as he follows a familiar road.
But all at once Wolf thought vividly, sharply, disturbingly of Mr. Malakite.
“I hope I’m not going to overtake him!” he said to himself; and then, before this hope was fully registered in his conscious brain, there in the dimness, standing as if she were waiting for him, was Christie herself!
“I knew your step. I knew the tap of your stick,” she said hurriedly. “I haven’t been here very long. Father came back and told me he’d had tea with you and then went off to get supper in the town; for he knew I hadn’t anything for him in the house.”
She spoke hurriedly, but quite calmly; and all the while she was speaking, she held one of Wolf’s hands tightly with one of her own, and kept rubbing his knuckles with her other hand, as if she were rubbing out some stain left by Time itself, some imprint which the days that had passed since they had last seen each other had left there.
“Do you realize,” he said, “that two seconds before I saw you I thought suddenly of your father? That shows something, doesn’t it?”
“I’ve been thinking of him, and of you too, Wolf, all the afternoon. When he told me you were watching that game of bowls, I said to myself in a flash, ‘I’ll go out and meet Wolf coming back!’—and you see I did meet you.”
She spoke with a wavering happiness that seemed to be lifting the syllables of her voice up and down on the darkness as the undulations of a full-brimmed tide might lift a drifting boat.
“Let’s find a place to sit down for a minute,” said Wolf. “I can’t realize I’ve got you, when we’re just standing up like this.”
He tightened his clasp upon her hand and led her to the hedge. A mass of vague, dark umbrageousness confronted them.
“Stop!” he whispered, “while I see if there’s a ditch.”
He advanced slowly, feeling with his stick among the hemlocks and dock-leaves.
“There’s no water, anyway,” he said, stepping down among the obscure rank-scented growths. “Wait a second,” he cried, “I believe we can get up over this.”
He felt about with his free hand. He could just detect the faint outlines of the branches of some small tree or shrub. It turned out—well did he know that acrid mind-cleansing pungency in his nostrils!—to be an elder-bush; and he pulled himself up by its brittle stalks till he attained the summit of the hedge.
“Come on! Catch hold!” he cried triumphantly, securing a firm position for himself and stretching out the handle of his stick towards her.
It took her a second or two of struggling amid the mass of weeds and of fumbling with upraised arm, before she reached the extended support. But when once she felt it between her fingers she clung tight with both hands, and he soon pulled her up beside him.
They found themselves, by a lucky chance, in a wheat-field that had been cut but not yet carried; and after a step or two across the stubble, they sank down with a mutual cry of satisfaction against the side of a shock of corn.
The weight of the immense vaporous summer darkness covered them there like a waveless ocean. They floated there upon a cool, yielding darkness that had neither substance nor shape, a darkness full of a faint fragrance that was the sweetness neither of clover nor of poppies nor of corn nor of grass, but was rather the breath of the great terrestrial orb itself, a dark, interior, outflowing sweetness between vast-rocking waves of air, where firmament bent down to firmament, and space rose up to meet space.
He kept fast hold of her hand; and her fingers seemed still cold and stiff and impassive, just as they had done when he first took them in the road. She did not bend her head towards him as they sat side by side, nor did he make the least movement to put his arm round her.
Wolf had sunk a little lower in the corn-shock than she, so that their heads were exactly level; and to any inquisitive owl or nightjar hovering across that stubble-field they must have appeared like two well-constructed scarecrows, good enough to frighten the silly daylight rooks, but quite negligible and harmless to all more sagacious nocturnal eyes.
“When I’m with you like this,” said Wolf, “I feel as if I’d stripped my mind clean off my spirit; pulled it off as I might pull off my vest when I go to bed! I feel as if I could actually see my mind now, like that terrible flayed skin in the Last Judgement, lying there on the ground. I can see the rents in it and the stains on it and all the insane zigzag creases!”
“I knew I should meet you tonight,” said Christie, “just as I really knew, though I wouldn’t admit I knew, that you’d come to me that day of the fair. I felt it would be like this the moment my father left the shop. Do you think it’s being the daughter of my mother that gives me these feelings, or do you think every girl who’s in love has them sometimes?”
The question fell like a ripple of the very sweetness of the night over Wolf’s soul, but he went on thinking aloud without replying.
“The odd thing is that when I’m away from you I can hardly call up your face. Mother’s face and Gerda’s face I know like two books; but it’s as if I carried your identity so close to me that I couldn’t see a single expression of it.”
“I feel unreal,” said Christie. “That’s how I feel—unreal. I’ve told myself stories about a lover since I was little. But after Olwen was born—oh, and before that, too—my life was so crushed and inert that I seemed to look at everything from some point outside of myself—as if my mind had been a cold, hard, inert mirror, reflecting what was there, but not feeling anything. But now I’ve known you it’s been all different. My mind has got in touch again. I was a mere husk or shell all those miserable years—without a heart at all. But now the husk has come to life, and my heart with it. But sometimes I think my heart’s still partly dead.”
“I’m perfectly satisfied with how your heart is,” Wolf threw in. “Alive or dead, I’ve got it now, and I’m never going to let it go! What’s so strange is that I don’t idealize you one bit; and I don’t think you idealize me either. I think it’s wonderful how we accept each other just as we are.”
“Whether it’s being my mother’s daughter or not,” said Christie, “it’s a great comfort to me to have the feelings I have about what you’re doing or where you are. … I think if anything happened to you I should know.”
“I wonder what it really is in us,” said Wolf, “that makes us so happy as we are? All other lovers in our position I know very well would be desperate to make love, to live together, to have a child; but here we are, in this field, perfectly content just to be side by side. You don’t want anything more than this, Christie, do you?”
“I don’t know, Wolf, that I’ll always feel as I do now. How can I know? But certainly tonight I don’t want anything else.”
She stopped; and then, after a little pause, her voice began again in the darkness.
“But you don’t think, Wolf”—her tone had in it now a certain half-humorous dismay—“that what we feel for each other could ever be called ‘Platonic,’ do you? I don’t know … perhaps it’s because the word’s been so misused … but I’ve always had such an aversion to that idea. The mere possibility of its being applied to the mysterious feeling between us, just because we don’t want what people usually do who are in love, reduces everything for me in some way … do you know what I mean?”
“Ay, Christie! Christie!” he cried. “How my father would chuckle if he heard those words of yours! You know how he would regard us and the way we behave? As nothing less than stark, staring mad! I’m damned if I know what ‘Platonic’ does mean … but I’m rather inclined … to think … to think … that our way of dealing … with things … with our feeling for each other … is much more medieval than Platonic.”
“Medieval, Wolf?” protested Christie.
“Don’t be cross with me. I know I’m absurd. I suppose I’m more of a slave to philosophical phrases than anyone in the whole of England! I love the sound of them. They have something … a sort of magic … I don’t know what … that makes life rich and exciting to me.”
“Oh, I know what you mean, Wolf!” cried Christie. “That’s why I’ve loved reading those books in our shop … especially Leibnitz and Hegel. I’ve never been able to follow their real meaning, I suppose; but all the same it’s been a great satisfaction to me to read them.”
“I don’t think it’s pedantry or priggishness in either of us,” Wolf continued. “I think we’re thrilled by the weight of history that lies behind each one of these phrases. It isn’t just the word itself, or just its immediate meaning. It’s a long, trailing margin of human sensations, life by life, century by century, that gives us this peculiar thrill. Don’t you think so, Christie?”
“What I was going to say,” the girl murmured, “was that since I’ve known you I haven’t cared so much for these philosophical books.”
“Nonsense!” he muttered. But once more there floated over him an undulating tide of happiness that made the mere tone of her voice seem to him like those fluctuating wine-dark shadows on the deep sea, that suggest the presence of cool-swaying fields of submerged seaweeds lying beneath the water.
“I know they’re absurd … these phrases …” he went on. “Words like ‘pluralism’ and ‘dualism’ and ‘monism.’ But what they make me think of is just a particular class of vague, delicious, physical sensations! And it’s the idea of there having been feelings like these, in far-off, long-buried human nerves, that pleases us both so much. It makes life seem so thick and rich and complicated, if you know what I mean?”
They were both silent, and presently she struggled stiffly to her feet.
“And now, Wolf dear,” she said, “I’m sure it’s time we went on! I don’t like being the one to say it … or being the one to interrupt our thoughts … but Father will be back, and Gerda will be expecting you.”
He rose to his feet, too, and they stood awkwardly there, side by side in that windless darkness. Wolf had the feeling for one second as if the world had completely passed them by … gone on its way and forgotten them … so that not a soul knew they existed except themselves. As the shadow of a solitary bird on lonely sands answers the form of the bird’s flying, so did he feel at that moment that his spirit answered her spirit.
But the moment passed quickly. A vague, troubling remembrance of that “yellow bracken” down by the Lunt rose up suddenly without cause. “Gerda must be thinking of me,” he said to himself. And as this thought came into his head he couldn’t resist a savage, secret jibing at his own treachery. “I wonder,” he thought, “what Jason would say if he knew everything!”
The girl’s figure, close to him as it was, seemed like a pillar of mist. “It’s lovemaking,” he thought, “just the relief of lovemaking, that saves a person’s touchy mind from these morbid thoughts. But Christie doesn’t depend on that, any more than I do. What would Jason say if he saw us now?” And then there came upon him a curious sense of shame that his mind had the power of wandering so far. “Is her mind wandering too?” he thought. “What is going on in her mind?”
He spoke to her then … to that blur that was her face in the darkness.
“As long as we see each other like this, it’ll go on being all right, won’t it, Christie?”
Her voice replied to his voice with a sound that might have been a whisper out of his own heart or might have been a cry from the other side of the world.
“But it’s hard now. It’s hard when it ends,” she murmured.
“We might never have met at all,” he said resolutely. “We’ve had all we wanted tonight. It’s been as if all the noises of the world had blent into one, and then quite died away. Listen, Christie, there’s not a stir or movement. It’s silence like this that you and I have always wanted … all our lives.”
“But it’s hard when it ends,” she repeated.
“We mustn’t think of that,” he said. “Our thoughts will always be able to find this silence. We shall always be able to reach each other with our thoughts, wherever we are. Don’t you feel like that, Christie?”
“I try to,” she said.
“You do. No one else except you could answer a person’s thoughts before they’ve been spoken! You must know, Christie, how I go muttering on and on to you, in my heart, day and night, telling you every single feeling I have?”
“I tell you things too, Wolf. I talk to you, too, sometimes … but still, but still …”
Her voice broke in a light sigh that floated away into the stubble, fainter than the falling of a feather.
“I know,” he repeated obstinately. “But don’t let’s be ungrateful to the gods, Christie. Think, how easy for us never to have met at all! Think, how I might have gone on with my life in London, you with your life in Blacksod! But now it’s all different. And there really is a sense … don’t you see, Christie? … in which by just knowing each other and being as we are we’ve got outside Time and outside Space! We’ve got into a region where all this—”
“Stop, Wolf, stop!” the girl cried. “I can’t bear it now. I tell you I can’t—”
He moved towards her, seeking to touch her; but she drew away from him.
“Forgive me!” she said, in a low, quiet voice. “It isn’t that I don’t understand you. I feel all those things. It’s only that … at the end … when I’ve got to leave you … that all this seems … I mean doesn’t seem …”
The gentleness of her tone softened the reproach, if reproach there was; and Wolf was conscious of nothing but an obscure rebellion within him against this mysterious pride in them both which made it so hard for him to risk the relief of the least caress. It was his turn to sigh now—a heavier sigh than hers—and in a second she caught his change of mood.
“I love you so much, Wolf,” she said. “I wouldn’t hurt you for anything. It’s what I feel for you that makes it so hard when you’ve got to go and I’ve got to go. And I know what you mean … I do know what you mean … about … about our thoughts!”
As she spoke she moved towards him a little in the darkness. It was an almost imperceptible movement; but it was enough to send a perilous stab of tenderness through his nerves.
“Christie, oh, Christie …” he murmured, involuntarily starting towards her.
But she had already gathered her cloak about her and held it tightly with one hand under her chin.
“It’s all right, Wolf! It’s all right!” she said quickly, turning as if with a swift impulse for flight towards the hedge.
“It would be mad now, I suppose,” he thought, as he followed her through the entangled branches.
Half-an-hour later, and he was walking with a rapid, preoccupied step along the lighted pavement of the Blacksod High Street. His head was so full of Christie, as he strode along, that the people he passed were as much phantoms to him as had been the elm-trees on the road from King’s Barton.
Christie had agreed to come on Monday. That was what he was thinking about now; and it was an imaginary dialogue with Gerda, dealing with this project, that he was now occupied in rehearsing, sentence by sentence, as he hurried along.
“If she refuses, she refuses!” he thought. “I shan’t press her. I’ll just have to tell them the thing’s off.”
He had just reached the point, close to the marketplace, where Preston Lane debouched from the High Street, when he encountered, without any warning of his approach, for the pavement was crowded, the lean Panurge-like figure of Bob Weevil, hurrying along in a new straw-hat and new flannel trousers.
“Hullo!” said the young grocer, with a shrinking, startled movement; and then he gave a furtive glance around him, as if to ensure public protection from a possible outburst of physical violence.
“Oh, it’s you, is it, Bob?” said Wolf. “Where are you going so fast?”
Mr. Weevil stopped and gazed at him with screwed-up eyelids, as he shook him by the hand.
“Home,” he announced, in a loud, unpleasant voice. “Home to Dad. ‘Little Bobbie’s Best at Home,’ ” he went on. “Where’ve you been? Pursuing the Necessary over at Barton?”
The forced grin that animated the lad’s features as he indulged in these pleasantries was so obviously embarrassed and uneasy, that Wolf became instantaneously suspicious. Every word of Jason’s innuendoes returned to his mind. There also returned to him that still more sinister hint whispered by the poet on the day of the snatching away of Mukalog.
“Where have you been?” he asked abruptly.
He did his best to give his voice a casual tone; but the effect of his question upon Mr. Weevil showed that this effort was unsuccessful.
“You’re not a detective, are you?” jeered the young man, in a boisterously insolent manner. “ ‘Little Bobbie’s Best at Home,’ ” he repeated. “Do you know that song? I’ll give you the rest of it some day.”
“Well, good night to you!” rapped out Wolf, brusquely and almost rudely. “I’ve had a long day. Good night to you; and don’t stay in the water so long the next time you bathe in Lenty Pond!”
He moved off at that, grimly entertained, in spite of his agitation, by the manner in which the young man’s eyes and mouth opened at the tone of this remark.
“He’s been with Gerda,” he thought, as he hurried on.