“This Is Reality”
As soon as he reached Preston Lane, Wolf looked at his watch under the first of the three lampposts which were all the illumination that Blacksod had bestowed on that humble district. It was a quarter past nine. He must have been more than an hour in the cornfield; for he had left the bowling-green at seven.
“He’s been with Gerda.” This single thought had brought him from the centre of the town to where he now stood, without consciousness of anything in the world except one solitary fish’s eye—glazed and staring—that he had caught a glimpse of on a gas-lit counter.
He was too staggered even to experience surprise at his unexpected feelings. No alert self-watchful demon in him cried out, “What is this?” or “What does this mean?” He just suffered; and his suffering was such a completely new thing to him that he had no mental apparatus ready with which to deal with it. He was like a man who all his life had stalked leopards, suddenly confronted by a charging rhinoceros! All the blood that was in him seemed to have rushed with blind, irrational violence to a portion of his nervous system which he had supposed atrophied and callous. Vividly he recalled Jason’s warning to him in the road by the churchyard. “Those people must have pushed him to this,” he thought. “Not very nice,” he thought, “to think of the water-rat boasting up there with them and telling tales about her!”
He stood stock-still beneath the lamppost. He felt as though a mob of Urquharts and Jasons had burst into the inmost sanctuary of his feelings—of his inarticulate physical feelings—and were jeering at them. He felt as though he had been stripped naked—as though he had become a laughingstock to the human race. These were just the things—these physical feelings—that in his pride he had hidden from everyone. And now they were held up to derision, and he himself with them! He walked slowly across the road and then stopped and looked about him.
Everything was quiet. Most of the windows of those neat little houses displayed shaded gas-jets between the muslin curtains. From where he stood, the dark outline of the pig-dealer’s shed was a small huddled blackness against the tall ash-tree further on. Over the top of the shadowy hedge came a faint smell of cattle-trampled grass, a poor antidote to the manure-drain whose stench soon swallowed it up. His own house was still two or three doors off. He could see a thin stream of light emerging from its upper window. Gerda was in her bedroom, then—in her bedroom at a quarter past nine! Had Bob Weevil cajoled her up there, directly they’d finished their supper? “Where did I once read,” he thought, “that whatever liberties they allow, they usually fight shy of their man’s bed? Good Lord! but what are beds? Beds are nothing. Beds are birth, death, and the morning and evening. But they’re nothing when it comes to this! This can take the heart out of any bed.”
He recrossed the road to where the lamppost was. The particular house just there had no light in the front-windows. Instead of this there was a small notice which he could plainly read. “Furnished Room to let. Inquire within. Mrs. Herbert.” “I suppose I’ve seen Mrs. Herbert,” he thought, “a hundred times without knowing her. And I shall never know her. I shall die without knowing her.”
He tapped Mrs. Herbert’s railings with his stick. “It’s not that I grudge Gerda any pleasure,” he thought. “It’s that I don’t like spectators at my pleasure. She’ll be just the same whatever Bob Weevil did. But he’ll always be there … hiding behind her thoughts like a rat behind a screen … and watching me when I touch her. He’ll be in her thoughts when I’m holding her. He’ll be always there. I shall be eating with him, sleeping with him. There’ll always be a slit in her thoughts through which his eye will be on me.”
He remembered how his mother had once come home in high spirits to their London flat, after a conversation with her cousin, Lord Carfax, and told him how this nobleman had explained to her his philosophy of free-love, and how barbarous it was to grow jealous and possessive when you were enamoured. “Jealous?” he thought. “Well! He’s more sociable than I am, the good Carfax. I like to be alone in my house … not to be peeped at by a third person from the back of my girl’s head!”
He felt an extreme reluctance to move a step from where he was at the railings of the unknown Mrs. Herbert. “I’ve talked a lot about reality,” he said to himself. “But now I know a little better what mine is …”
“This is reality,” he thought. “This is the kind of thing that men returning home at a quarter past nine, in Colorado, in Singapore, in Moscow, in Cape-Town, in New Zealand, see in the darkness! … This is reality,” he thought.
He looked down at the tiny gutter at his feet between the asphalted pavement and the road. The lamplight shone upon this gutter, and he observed a torn piece of newspaper lying in it—a headline of the Western Gazette—and just tilted against the edge of this headline he saw an empty greenish-coloured tin. He could even read the words upon that torn bit of paper—printed in large, heavy type. “France distr … land.” “France distrusts England,” he repeated to himself; and then “Lyle’s Golden Syrup.” He could read that, without reading it! Much sweetness had he, in his time, watched Gerda imbibing from such a greenish-coloured receptacle!
“Does Mattie make ’em give Olwen her ‘golden syrup’ out at Pond Cottage? This is reality,” he thought.
Down under his feet, under this asphalt, under this Somerset clay, down to the centre of the globe, went the mystery of solid matter. Up, up above him, beyond all this thick swine-scented darkness, went space, air, emptiness—the mystery of un-solid matter. “France distr … land”—“Lyle’s Golden Syrup.” Poke them with the end of an oak-stick. … “You’ll walk into a pit with your precious stick, master!”—was that what Jason had said?
Pluralism, pantheism, monism! … Phrases … phrases made by men who come home at a quarter past nine. But these sounds too … these large, easy, purring sounds … part of reality!
Did Bob Weevil pull up her clothes? They like to have ’em unhooked better than that … untied … slipping down. … They never lose that sense … They belie ’em when they say they lose that sense. What sense? The beauty of their beauty … the sense of being beautifully loved … “This is reality,” he thought. “They belie ’em when they say … Up or down, Bob Weevil? That’s the question. Up is infinite. Down is infinite. Pantheism, dualism, pluralism! An ounce of civet, good Master Jason!”
He moved on and stood by the little iron gate of his own house. He did not look up, because there suddenly came to him the nervous idea that she was kneeling on the floor in her short “slip,” peeping out at him; and he didn’t feel in a mood to be peeped at!
What he did was to stare at the latch of the gate, wondering if he could lift it without making any sound. She had so often heard that “click” and come running to welcome him. He felt that to make that particular noise now would be as if he entered her presence with his face blackened all over like a clown. …
But now there arose a different question. His mind began tying itself in a knot like a twisting snake. His own voice was in his ears assuring Christie that, all day and all night, he did nothing but live with her in his thoughts, telling her everything! Could he now tell her everything? … She who at this very minute was no doubt standing at her window? Why couldn’t he tell her everything? Why couldn’t he tell her that it wasn’t that he grudged Gerda pleasure … that it was only that he grudged Bob Weevil the sort of pleasure he had got from that tombstone-picture! Why couldn’t he explain all this to Christie; why couldn’t he explain to her that it was not the thing itself, but only the way … the way in which Bob Weevil did … whatever it was he did?
He knew perfectly well that Christie understood his attachment to Gerda. He knew perfectly well that she would understand his resentment at the intrusion of Bob Weevil. What he could never, never make her understand would be this cold, sickening nausea he felt toward the simple, actual facts of what must have gone on. How could Gerda allow it? How could she?
But perhaps she did struggle a little—if only out of pride—when Bob Weevil began fumbling. But soon there could have been no sound at all except their breathing, except their hard breathing … Gerda would suffer, if she knew about Christie, the most secret of feminine sufferings … deeper than “France distr … land” … But a man coming home at a quarter past nine suffered too, the most secret of male sufferings … “An ounce of civet, good Master Jason!” He bent his head low down over the little iron railings, trying to think—to think and get it all clear.
He leaned against the little gate, while some unperturbed portion of his consciousness set itself to wonder whether it were a marigold or a petunia that emitted a faint whitish lustre in the darkness. There were plants of both of them there; but he couldn’t remember their position—whether the marigolds were there or there! Then a thought came into his head that made him straighten his back, click the latch, open it, and walk boldly to the door.
If Gerda and Mr. Weevil were really fond of each other—if the girl had grown weary of him and his heavy lumpish mind—why couldn’t they separate … he his way … she her way?
To his surprise—in spite of the lighted candle upstairs—Gerda was seated quietly, contentedly, calmly, at a table in their parlour. She was hemming an apron; and before she smilingly rose to greet him, he saw her quickly but carefully fix her needle in her bobbin of white thread. She threw her arms round his neck and kissed him, not passionately or perfunctorily, but affectionately and gaily.
“I had tea late and waited supper. It’s all ready in the kitchen,” she said, releasing him. And then she stretched herself, with both arms outspread; and her careless air of indolent well-being was accentuated by the childish smile that covered a shameless yawn. Wolf returned to the passage to hang up his hat and place his stick in its accustomed corner. He could not help thinking of Jason as he did this.
When he returned she was folding up her sewing and putting it away in a drawer. She looked at him smilingly over her shoulder. “I’ve had a visitor for tea, Wolf. Guess who it was.”
“It wouldn’t be much of a game for me to guess that, Gerda,” he said with all the lightness he could assume. “Careful! Careful, now!” his fighting-spirit whispered to his excited nerves. “If you make the least false move she’ll have you at a disadvantage.”
“Why not?” The girl approached him, as she spoke, giving him a long, scrutinizing glance. “What’s the matter, Wolf? Is anything wrong?” She laid both her hands on his coat, clutching its unbuttoned flaps and tightening them round him with a gesture that was at once imperative and cajoling.
“I met Bob Weevil just now,” he murmured, trying to give the words a natural tone, and smoothing out every sign of treachery from his face.
But with incredible rapidity, even while she was lifting up her chin and opening her lips, the self-protective demon in him cursed him for a blundering fool. “Why did you blurt that out?” said the demon.
“And he told you he’d been here?” Her words were as calm as if she’d said, “And he told you he’d been playing bowls.” She released her hold upon his coat and with easy naturalness ran out into the passage and thence into the kitchen.
Wolf heard her collecting the supper-things. He heard the sound of running water and the sound of metal against earthenware. He looked round the room. Ah! there was something he hadn’t noticed before, a draught-board open, with the black and white disks jumbled in casual confusion over its checkered surface.
So they had been playing draughts!
He walked thoughtfully up to this object and began piling up the round wooden counters, one on the top of another, balancing his shaky tower with his fingers as it began to sway. Then he removed his hand, and his tower fell with a crash, and many of the pieces rolled on the floor.
The house was so still that the sudden noise brought Gerda running into the room—to find him standing by the draught-table.
“What’s the matter with you?” she cried peevishly. “Aren’t you going to help me get supper? Aren’t you even going to wash your hands?”
“So you and Bob were playing draughts? I never knew you even knew the game, Gerda,” he said.
“Come and wash your hands,” she replied in a calm, scolding tone. “I’ve got tomato-soup. It’ll be ready in a minute. I’ll tell you every bit of the gossip about Bob when we’ve sat down! Of course I know draughts. Bob taught me years ago, when I was little. Today I won every single game. I was ‘huffing’ him all the time. But do come, Wolf. I’m hungry. Never mind picking up those things!”
He followed her into the kitchen and stood there, awkwardly and sulkily, till the meal was ready.
“I’m going to have beer tonight, Gerda,” he said. “I don’t know if you are.”
“I certainly am!” she said in her most cheerful tone, seating herself at the table and breaking a piece of bread with one hand, while she dipped her spoon into the soup with the other.
He went to the cupboard and came back with three bottles.
“Wolf … dear!” she cried, with her mouth full. “Who’s the third bottle for? Have you got somebody coming in?”
“It’s for me,” he remarked laconically. “I’m tired tonight. I’ve had a long day.”
“But, Wolf—isn’t it rather extravagant drinking so much at one meal?”
He didn’t reply to this, but busied himself with opening two of the bottles and with filling her glass and his own.
“It’s good … this soup … isn’t it, Wolf?” she remarked presently, passing the tip of her pink tongue over one corner of her perfectly curved lip and lifting her spoon once more to her mouth.
He poured half his glassful of beer, froth and all, down his throat without a word! Then he began swallowing the soup in rapid gulps.
“Good soup … very good soup,” he muttered.
She gave him a quick, penetrating look over her own raised glass, just sipped at the white foam, and then replaced the tumbler on the table. The next spoonful she lifted slowly, meditatively, absentmindedly, a little puckered frown hovering about her forehead.
Wolf set himself obstinately and resolutely to finish the meal. Eating pieces of crumbled bread, hurriedly, intently, as if the process were something important in itself, leading to some desirable consummation, he kept drinking the beer in long draughts. The moment the first bottle was finished he opened the other, and with the same concentrated, absorbed determination disposed of that also.
“Good soup … very good soup,” he repeated, as if the words were a sop thrown over his shoulder to some insatiable Cerberus of the river of Time.
“I am the weakest, most gullible fool,” he thought, as he watched Gerda spreading a large slice of bread and then very deliberately taking little bites out of it, “ever born into the world. I oughtn’t to be called Wolf Solent at all! I ought to be called Mr. Thin Soup or Mr. Weak Beer.”
“Aren’t you going to give me a cigarette?” asked Gerda.
He got up to obey, and it seemed to him as if the physical effort it required to hand her what she demanded and to hold towards her a lighted match, were the heaviest material task he had ever stretched his muscles to perform.
He lighted one for himself, however, and resumed his seat.
In complete silence now, save for the ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece, the greyish-blue spirals of smoke rose from each end of the table and floated hesitatingly, fluctuatingly, towards one another, high up above the two human heads.
“It’s the weakness of your nature, Beer-Soup,” he said to himself. “The weakness and the gullibility.” Then he recalled the sudden bold resolve with which he had clicked the latch of their gate; and he compared that flash of inspiration with his wretched feelings now. Didn’t he know himself at all? What he felt now was a complete disintegration of desire and will. He felt as if his consciousness were a tiny fitful flame, no, not a flame even, a scarcely visible vapour, hovering over a chaos of conflicting wishes, purposes, desires, hopes, regrets, that were so disorganized as to utterly cancel one another. They felt remote from him, too, these feelings that ought to have been his—remote and infinitely contemptible! The only desire this weak, floating awareness retained was a desire to escape from them altogether. For disorganized though they were, a dull nausea, sickening and paralyzing, ascended from them, troubling that feeble, free consciousness of his, as a putrefying body might trouble some frail “animula vagula” only half-escaped from it.
He struggled to use his brain, his free brain. “What is the matter with you, you lump of asininity? Speak up, express yourself, Mr. Wolf Beer-Soup!”
Then he suddenly recalled what he had felt as he drank that Dorchester ale in the bowling-green of Farmer’s Rest. He had felt completely master of his destiny then. All these disorganized emotions, all these nervous electric currents, were gathered up then and focused. Was he perhaps … innately incapable of dealing with women, whether in the way of lust, or in the way of tenderness? Was he only a man when confronted with men? Thrown with women, did his whole nature turn lumpish, sapless, porous? He began suddenly to have that appalling sensation which had come to him on Babylon Hill, as if his head … the thing that said “I am I” … were twisting and turning, like an uprisen hooded serpent … above a body of unspeakable decomposition. …
Like a drowning man he stretched out his thoughts for help in every direction. To his mother he stretched them out. To his father he stretched them out. Feebly and automatically he carried his thoughts like a basket of dying fish to the threshold of Christie’s room. “Christie! I must tell you … I must, I must tell you!”
But it seemed to him then as if even Christie’s mind were shut to his helplessness. He seemed to hear her cry, “Stop, Wolf, stop! I can’t bear to hear it!”
“This can’t go on,” he thought. “I must end this somehow; or I shall go mad.”
He rose to his feet and began pacing up and down the kitchen.
Gerda watched him in silence for a moment or two; and then, extinguishing the remains of her cigarette against the edge of her empty soup-plate, she said to him, quite naturally and quietly:
“Wolf darling, just run upstairs, will you, and see if I left my candle burning? I want to wash up before we go to bed.”
He stared at her in bewilderment, blinking his eyes. Then he lifted his hand to his mouth and held it there—held it to hide that trick he had, when he was at the limit of his endurance, of working the muscles of his lower jaw.
Gerda calmly rose from her seat and began gathering together the things on the table. “Do run up and put out that candle, Wolf,” she repeated. “We don’t want a fire in our house.”
He obeyed her in silence now, and ascended the creaking steps, dragging his feet. He felt as if some completely different person—some docile, harmless, lumpish idiot—had taken the place of the Wolf he knew.
When he entered the room he found that the candle she had left there was low down in its candlestick, burning and guttering sideways, and dropping grease over the cover of the chest of drawers. He bent down mechanically to blow it out, receiving as he did so the full force of the carbonic-acid gas in his face. With no conscious purpose in his mind, he approached the bed, and, in the darkness, passed his hand hesitatingly over both the pillows, as if feeling for something.
Then he stood straight up against the edge of the bed, his knees touching the sheeted mattress, his arms hanging limp at his sides.
Quite externally and objectively, as if it had been this idiotic other person and not himself at all who formulated the thought, he wondered whether it was after she had let Bob Weevil make love to her up here, or before, that the game of draughts had been brought out. A hideous commentary upon this problem seemed to arise then from the mass of his own disorganized nerves. “Why don’t you ask Christie what she thinks? Christie is a girl. Christie will be able to tell you whether it was before the draughts or after the draughts!”
He left the bed and went to the open window, hearing, as he did so, the sound of Gerda’s clattering with the supper-things as she calmly washed up below.
The window was open at the top, so that to get the coolness of the air he was forced to lean his elbows upon the woodwork and rest his chin upon the back of his folded hands.
He remembered to the end of his life what he felt at that moment, while the bone of his lower jaw met the bones of his knuckles pressed so hard against them. He felt absolutely alone—alone in an emptiness that was different from empty space. He did not pity himself. He did not hate himself. He just endured himself and waited—waited till whatever it was that enclosed him made some sign.
By slow degrees it dawned on him that he had been for the last two or three minutes seeing something without being conscious of what he saw. Now it began to grow slowly plain to him, lineament by lineament, feature by feature, what it was he had been seeing in the darkness of that room, in the darkness of this obscure night.
It was the face of the man on the Waterloo steps! And out of his abominable misery Wolf cried a wordless cry to this face; and the nature of this cry was such that it seemed to break—so desperate it was—some psychic tension in his brain. And it seemed to him that what he was appealing to now was something beyond his mother, beyond his father, beyond Christie herself—something that was the upgathered, incarnated look, turned toward life’s engines, of every sentient thing, since the beginning of time, that those engines had crushed.
The smell of the pigsty across the way must have been the reason why the look he appealed to was only partially human. It was an animal look … it was a bird look … it was the look of the fish’s eye that he had seen on a counter as he came along the street that very night; it was the look of a wounded snake’s eye that he had had time to mark long ago, out on some country road near London, before he ended its suffering.
It was, in fact, the Life-Eye, looking out on what hurts it, that he now knew he had caught glimpses of, all the days of his existence, in a thousand shapes and forms. From air, earth, water, had he intercepted the appeal of that little round living hole … that hole that went through the wall … straight into something else. Into what else? No one knew or would ever know. But into something else. It was upon this he was crying out now … upon that eye … upon that little round hole … upon that chink, that cranny, that slit, out of which life protested against its infamous enemy!
“Jesus … Jesus … Jesus … Jesus!”
Was that the heart of Wolf Solent howling a wordless howl in a dark bedroom, or was it the voice of Mr. Round of Farmer’s Rest seeking escape from his “worries”?
A sigh of unutterable relief shivered through Wolf’s nerves as they relaxed and yielded. He drew back from the window and began with an almost catlike movement licking his hurt knuckles.
His whole being seemed dissolving into some lovely liquid-floating substance, lighter than human flesh, and he became capable of thinking now with every portion of his identity, easily, freely, spontaneously.
“I’ve learnt one thing tonight,” he thought, as he crossed the room and felt about in the darkness for the handle of the door. “I’ve learnt that one can’t always get help by sinking into one’s own soul. It’s sometimes necessary to escape from oneself altogether.”
He ran down the little staircase with happy agility. He burst into the kitchen, where he found Gerda placidly and abstractedly polishing her knives and forks.
“How long you—” she began; but the words were stopped upon her mouth by an imprint of impetuous, almost boisterous kisses.
As he held her in his arms, Wolf’s thoughts were of the most intense and rapid kind. Why was it that his love for Christie hadn’t protected him from all this agitation? Why had he been paralyzed by Gerda’s calm? How was it that, in the unbelievable relief he experienced now, he really felt as if it didn’t very much matter what the water-rat had done or hadn’t done?
Releasing Gerda now, he seemed to bewilder her a good deal more by his high spirits than he had done by his moroseness.
“Don’t let’s go to bed just yet,” he said. “Let’s go for a tiny stroll down the road.”
“Why, Wolf, how funny you are tonight! A moment ago you were telling me that you were quite exhausted.”
She yielded good-humouredly, however, to his caprice, and they went out together into the narrow road.
Wolf had the strangest feeling as he clicked the latch of the gate to let her through. It was as if he were breaking some law of nature—refuting some inflexible scientific category of cause and effect.
He kept his arm tight about her, and led her up the road, in the direction away from the town, till they came to the place where the immense ash-tree lifted its branches into the dark air high above their heads.
There was a small gap in the hedge at this point, and Wolf pulled her through it, into the meadow on the other side. “For the second time tonight!” whispered his demon. But for some reason the mockery glanced off from Wolf’s present mood of slippery buoyancy, without causing him the slightest discomfort. “Very well, then,” he mentally retorted, “for the second time it shall be!”
They found themselves now under the very trunk of the vast tree whose branches they had so often watched from their upper room. One branch bent so low down and stretched out so far that they instinctively put their arms about it and dallied with its cool foliage. Wolf even amused himself by gathering up those great multiform leaf-growths, so different from the foliations of all other trees, and twisting them, without breaking their flexible stalks, about the girl’s bare neck.
Gerda remained passive and yielding under this dalliance. It seemed to him that her mind was a little aloof; but he could see, without seeing it, the faint, docile smile, like that of a sweet-natured child drawn into a game it was ready to play without understanding, with which she submitted to his humour.
All at once there came a sudden coolness upon his face and a quick rustling above their heads. The wind was rising. Oh, this was what he had been craving for, ever since his return to Preston Lane! It had been—he knew it now—something in the heaviness of this windless air that had caused half his trouble. Had this cool wind been blowing when he crossed the threshold, everything would have been different. It was the wind he wanted, the wind, the wind; to blow away all odious eidolons of Bob Weevil’s presence out of his “sober house”!
He permitted the leafy ash-twigs that he had been bending to swing back to their natural position; and snatching at Gerda’s arm above the wrist, he drew the girl, like a captive, right up to the trunk of the great overshadowing tree. She remained still passive, gentle, unresisting, by his side, her head drooping a little, her whole being—so it seemed—lost in a calm untroubled quiescence. Holding her thus, but turning away from her, he rubbed the palm of his free hand up and down over the hard slightly-indented surface of the ash-trunk, whose bark, thin and tightly fitted, raised no barrier between his human touch and the tree’s own firm, hard wood-flesh.
“Human brains! Human knots of confusion!” he thought. “Why can’t we steal the calm vegetable clairvoyance of these great rooted lives?”
“I simply can’t understand myself,” he thought. “Why, after being so happy with Christie, should the idea of Bob Weevil, poor, lecherous little rat, have worried me so? And why didn’t I make a scene with Gerda—raise denials, anger, tears, reproaches? Why, instead of that, did I just muddy up my own wits?”
Still retaining his clasp of Gerda’s wrist, he leaned forward and pressed his bare forehead against the trunk of the ash-tree.
“What’s this, Wolf Solent? … What’s this, you lumpish, mock-Platonic, well-cuckolded ass? Ash-tree! Ash-tree!” Why had he been allowed by the justice of things to deny himself a single embrace with Christie, only to come home at a quarter past nine and find a lit candle in Gerda’s bedroom? Platonic cuckold! That was just what he was. … Not even Platonic … for Christie despised that word. … Mock-Platonic cuckold! Oh, it was all coming back! The knot in his mind was tying itself up again—tight—tight—tight! He continued to lean against the tree in the position of an animal that is butting with its skull against some immovable obstacle.
And then the Waterloo-steps’ eye, the fish’s eye, the snake’s eye, the slaughtered pig’s eye, the eye of a caged lark he had seen once as a child in St. Mary’s Street, Weymouth, all seemed to melt strangely together—all seemed to peer out at him from the heart of the tree-trunk against which he was butting with his skull.
And he thought to himself, “There are ways that I haven’t tried at all!” And he thought to himself: “Endless little things are beautiful and wonderful beyond words. And I can love Christie and forgive her for hating ‘Platonic’; and I can love Gerda and forgive her for letting Bob Weevil pull up her clothes. And if Christie and Gerda knew what I know, they’d forgive me for loving both of them! Christie would forgive me for not telling her. Gerda would forgive me for not telling her. There are things a person can’t tell. But there’s a way of floating like a mist out of my pride and conceit. There’s a way of accepting myself as Mr. Promise-Breaking-Beer-Soup, and yet not minding it at all … just becoming a cloud of mist that enjoys this cool wind … a cloud of mist that pities everything and enjoys everything!”
He swung away, back from the tree, at this, and let Gerda go.
“You’ve hurt me, Wolf!” the girl cried peevishly. “Why did you do that? I haven’t done anything to you. I wouldn’t have come out with you if I thought you were going to act so funny. Come! Let’s go in. What do you think I am, to stand so much silliness? You’re drunk—that’s what’s the matter with you; you’re just drunk and acting silly!”
He was so delighted to receive nothing but this very natural piece of scolding, that he only answered by hugging her tightly to his heart. “Little Gerda! Little Gerda!” he kept repeating. And he thought to himself: “I’ve exaggerated the whole thing. She can’t have let Weevil play with her and be like she is now!”
And then an idea came into his mind.
“Don’t be cross, sweetheart,” he said. “If I was drunk, I swear I’m all right now. But listen! Do let me lift you up into this tree, just for a minute! I’d so adore to hear your voice out of the leaves above my head and not see hardly a glimpse of you! Do get up into it, Gerda, and let me hear your voice from up there. You needn’t climb far. I can’t climb trees at all. I get dizzy. Or I’d climb it with you.”
The girl was still apparently enough of a child to be stirred by this unexpected appeal.
“But I’m so heavy, Wolf; and this branch is so high up.”
“Oh, no, it’s not—it’s not! There—shove yourself up on the palms of your hands. Jump—and lift yourself—you know? Like boys do on walls!”
He bent down and encircled her body with his arms, just above her knees, and lifted her up.
Gerda pressed her hands upon the bough as he had suggested, and after a few struggles was lying prone along it, holding it so closely with her arms and legs that he could hardly distinguish the one living thing from the other.
“Well done, sweetheart!” he cried. “That’s right. Now work your way towards the trunk. Careful now! Straddle your legs—you’ll scratch your knees like that—straddle your legs and hold with your hands!”
Again she obeyed him with good-humoured docility. And as he watched her shadowy figure riding the swaying branch, he could not help recalling the wicked tombstone-picture; and the thought—the very last thought he expected to cross his mind that night—flitted into his senses, that it would be a desirable moment when he blew out the candle in their room—blew out that candle for the second time!
“That’s it, Gerda, that’s it! Now get hold of the branch above, and pull yourself on to it!”
He came nearer the tree-trunk and gazed up into the darkness.
In a second or two he lost sight of her altogether, for Gerda was an adept at climbing trees. All he could detect was a vague rustling; and even that was very soon swallowed up by the murmur of the whole dark mass of foliage, stirred into movement now by the rising wind.
He waited. He leaned his back against the trunk. He listened to the long-drawn swish—swish—swish of the invisible, rustling leaves.
Then his heart gave a leap within his body and he caught his breath with an indrawn, quivering gasp.
A blackbird was whistling above his head! Faint and low at first, each liquid flute-note went sailing away upon the wind as if it had been a separate pearl-clear bubble of some immortal dew. Then, growing louder and clearer, the notes began following rapidly one upon another; but each one of them still remained distinct from the rest—a trembling water-transparent globe of thrilling sound, purged, inviolable—a drop of translunar melody, floating, floating, far above the world, carrying his very soul with it.
Then the notes changed, varied, overlapped, grew charged with some secret intention, some burden of immeasurable happiness, of sadness sweeter than happiness.
Rising still, freer, stronger, fuller, they began to gather to themselves the resonant volume of some incredible challenge, a challenge from the throat of life itself to all that obstructed it. Tossed forth upon the darkness, wild and sweet and free, this whistled birdsong, answering the voice of the rising wind, took to itself something that was at once so jocund and so wistful, that it seemed to him as though all the defiant acceptance of fate that he had ever found in green grass, in cool-rooted plants, in the valiant bodies of beasts and birds and fishes … “mountains and all hills … fruitful trees and all cedars” … had been distilled, by some miracle, in this one human mouth.
The whistling sank into silence at the very moment when its power over Wolf’s soul was at the flood. But without one single second of delay, when the last note had died, Gerda came scrambling down, laughing, rustling the leaves, and giving vent to petulant little outcries as her clothes impeded her descent. Wolf, when she finally fell, all panting and tremulous with wild gaiety, into his arms, felt that it was difficult to believe that this was the same Gerda whom he had watched, that very noon, asleep on the summit of Poll’s Camp.
As they returned hand in hand to their house-door, a queer, abashed sense came over him that all the events of this turbulent day had been a sort of feverish delirium. What was his mind that it should go through such agitation and remain unaltered—remain the same “I am I” of Wolf Solent?
But once again his self-knowledge received a shock. For no sooner were they inside their small domicile, no sooner had he glanced at the linoleum on the staircase, the wooden clock in the parlour, the familiar kitchen-table, than all these little objects hit his consciousness with a delicious thrilling sense of happy security, as if he had come back to them from some great voyage over desolate and forlorn seas, as if he had come back to them with his clothes drenched with saltwater and his hands wounded by tarred ropes! His mind may have remained unaltered by all this, but it had at any rate been washed very clean!
Upon every tiniest and least-important object he looked, that night, with a purged simplicity, a spontaneous satisfaction. The pinewood boarding at the edge of the linoleum stair-carpet, the pegs where their coats hung, the handles of the dresser-drawers, the rows of balanced plates, the cups suspended from the little hooks, the metal knobs at the end of their bed, Gerda’s comb and brush, the candlestick still covered with grease, and two exposed soap-dishes on the washing-stand, one containing a small piece of Pears’ soap and one containing a square lump of common yellow soap—all these things thrilled him, fascinated him, threw him into an ecstasy of well-being.
What was it that Mr. Urquhart had said, that day, about these little inanimates? Suicide he was talking about. But this was different. …
It was a very quiescent Gerda, lethargic and languorous, who lay down by his side that Friday night. It was a very indulgent Christie, grave and tender, who listened now in her room above the shop to his story about ash-trees and draught-boards—who listened to every thought he had, as she lay there with closed eyes!
No system at all! Only to dissolve into thin, fluctuating vapour; only to flow like a serpentine mist into the grave of his father, into the mocking heart of his mother, into the ash-tree, into the wind, into the sands on Weymouth Beach, into the voice of the landlord of Farmer’s Rest. No system at all!
Jesus … Jesus … Jesus … Jesus. …