Christie
The cheap wooden clock on the mantelpiece of his small parlour made itself audible to the ears of Wolf across the little passageway as he stood above his kitchen-stove. Eight times the clock struck; and the old vivid consciousness of what time was and was not caught his mind and held it. It was not a consciousness of the passing of time as it affected his own life that arrested him. Of that kind of individual awareness he had scarcely any trace. To himself he always seemed neither young nor old. Indeed, of bodily self-consciousness—that weather-eye, kept open to the addition of years and months upon his personal head—he had nothing at all. What he lived in was not any compact, continuous sense of personal identity, but rather a series of disembodied sensations, some physical, some mental, in which his identity was absolutely merged and lost. He was vividly aware of these momentary sensations in relation to other feelings of the same kind, some long past and some anticipated in his imagination; but he was accustomed to regard all these not from out of the skin, so to speak, of a living organism, but from a detachment so remote and far away as to seem almost outside both the flowing of time and the compactness of personality.
Eight o’clock in the morning of the first day of June was what that timepiece said to him now; and his mind paused upon the recognition of the vast company of clocks and watches all the world over, ticking, ticking, ticking—sending up, in tiny metallic beats, vibrations of human computation into the depths of unthinkable space.
He pushed open the iron cover of the stove and jabbed with his poker at the fire inside. Then he took up a wooden spoon and stirred the contents of an enamelled pot of porridge that stood there, moving it aside from the heat. A thrill of satisfaction ran through him when he had done this, and he rubbed his hands together and made a “face,” drawing back his underlip in the manner of a gargoyle, and constricting the muscles of his chin.
In less than half-an-hour, he thought, he would be enjoying his breakfast at that kitchen-table with Gerda, lovely and sulky as a young animal after her abrupt awakening.
He ran up the short flight of creaking stairs, carpeted with new linoleum; and with the merest pretence of a tap at the door entered their bedroom. The girl was lying on her back fast asleep, her fair hair spread out, loose and bright in the sunshine, across the indented pillow of her recent bedfellow. Her arms were outstretched above the coverlet, and one of her hands was hanging down over the side of the bed. His entrance did not arouse her, and he stood for a while at her side, meditating on the mysterious simplicity of her especial kind of loveliness.
Then he bent down, kissed her into consciousness, laughed at her scolding, and with one resolute swing of his arms lifted her bodily from the bed, set her on her feet on the floor, and hugged her to his heart, struggling and indignant. The warmth of her body under the childish white nightgown she wore, buttoned close up to her chin, gave him a rough, earthy, animal ecstasy. He had already discovered that it was more delicious to hold her like this, he himself fully awake and dressed, and she as she was, than under any other circumstances. A pleasant element of the unhabitual and the predatory sweetened for him that particular embrace. “Don’t!” she cried, struggling to push him away. “Don’t, Wolf! Let me go, I tell you!” But he went on kissing her and caressing her as if it had been the first time he had ever taken her in his arms.
At last, lifting her clean off her feet, with both arms under her body, he put her back upon the bed and drew the bedclothes over her.
“There!” he cried. “How does that feel?”
But the girl turned round with her face to the wall and refused to speak.
“Eight o’clock, young lady,” he cried brusquely. “Breakfast will be ready in a quarter of an hour.”
For answer she only pulled the bedclothes more tightly round her neck.
“If you haven’t time to wash or do your hair, you must come down as you are. Where’s your dressing-gown?” And he looked vaguely round the room. “Hurry up, now!” he added. “Remember all that’s going to happen today.”
There was a movement under the twisted sheet.
“You’re a wretch!” she gasped, in a muffled voice.
“Never mind what I am. Keep your scoldings till you get downstairs. I’ve got an exciting piece of news for you.”
This brought her round with a jerk.
“What are you hiding up in your mind now? Tell me quick! Tell me, Wolf!”
But he only laughed at her, waved his hand, and went out.
Running downstairs again, he returned to the kitchen, moved the steaming kettle to the side of the stove, turned the spoon in the oatmeal, and then, crossing the little passage where his own grey overcoat and Gerda’s cream-coloured cloak, hanging side by side on their adjoining pegs, regarded him with equivocal intentness, he opened the front-door and went out into the road.
In one warm inrushing wave the fragrance of the whole West Country seemed to flow through him as he came forth. Sap-sweet emanations from the leafy recesses of all the Dorset woods on that side of High Stoy seemed to mingle at that moment with the rank, grassy breath of all the meadow-lands of Somerset.
The iron railings in front of that row of meagre, nondescript houses opened upon the airy confluence of two vast provinces of leafiness and sunshine—to the right Melbury Bub, with its orchards and dairies; to the left Glastonbury, with its pastures and fens—while the umbrageous “auras” of these two regions, blending together in the air above the roofs of Blacksod, merged into yet a third essence, an essence sweeter than either—the very soul of the whole wide land lying between the English Channel and the Bristol Channel.
Number Thirty-Seven Preston Lane was the last house in a row of small workmen’s cottages at the extreme western limit of the town of Blacksod. What met Wolf’s actual eyes as he clicked the little gate in the iron railings and emerged upon the road, was only a small portion of the secret causes of his happiness that June morning. He had long craved to establish himself in just such a nondescript row of unpretentious dwellings on the outskirts of a town. He had always had a feeling that the magic of simple delights came with purer impact upon the mind when unalloyed by the “artistic” or the “picturesque.” Large houses and large gardens, pretty houses and pretty gardens, seemed to intrude themselves, with all their responsibilities of possession, between his senses and the free, clear flow of unconfined, unpersonalized beauty. His feeling about the matter had something in common with the instinct that has created the monk’s cell—only the cell that Wolf preferred was a lath-and-plaster workman’s villa, a place possessed of no single aesthetic quality, except perhaps that of being easily kept very neat and clean.
The fact of living here with Gerda under conditions identical with those of the Blacksod carpenters, bricklayers, and shop-assistants, threw into beautiful relief every incident of his life’s routine. Preparing food, preparing fires, the very floor-scrubbing wherein he shared, took on for him, just because of this absence of the deliberately “artistic,” a rarefied poetical glamour.
He moved out now into the middle of the road and surveyed the landscape. As he did so, two very distinct and contradictory odours assailed his nostrils. There were no houses across the way, nothing but a foul-smelling ditch, the recipient of sewage from an adjoining pig-yard; and beyond that, an enormously high hedge, on the top of which, where no child could reach, grew clumps of honeysuckle and sprays of wild roses. The smell of these flowers contended oddly enough with the smell of pigs’ dung; and the two odours, thus subtly mingled, had become for him a constant accompaniment to the thoughts that passed through his mind as he went in and out of his tiny front-garden.
The pigsty was on his right as he stood facing the ditch; but on his left there grew in the meadow just beyond the hedge a large ash-tree—a tree from among whose grey upcurving branches a thrush was wont to sing, always increasing the vehemence of its ecstasy till the moment when the road grew quite dark. The bird began singing now, and its thrush-notes made Wolf think of those wild blackbird-notes of Gerda, as they flooded the meadows on the day when she lost her virginity.
Thinking of Gerda as he stared up into the ash-tree, he began to meditate on the extraordinary good luck he had had ever since he had come to the West Country. “I must be born under a lucky star,” he thought; and his mind set itself to review the most recent examples of this good fortune.
He recalled the satisfactory manner in which his iron-willed mother had suddenly receded from all her opposition to his union with Gerda. He recalled the equally satisfactory generosity of Mr. Urquhart, who had come forward with an offer to let her go on living at Lenty Cottage free of rent as long as Wolf himself remained his secretary.
He recalled the extraordinary kindness displayed toward him by Darnley Otter, who had not only lent him the fifty pounds necessary to buy furniture, but had also introduced him to the authorities of the Blacksod Grammar School, where he was now earning a pound a week by giving lessons every morning in English and History.
“Luck! luck! luck!” he said in his heart, rubbing his hands together. Through his thin indoor shoes the magnetism of the earth seemed at that moment pouring into every nerve of his body. Happiness, such as he had rarely experienced, flooded his being; and the fantastic idea came into his head that if he were to die now he would in some subtle way cheat death.
“I must remember this moment,” he said to himself. “Whatever happens to me henceforth, I must remember this moment, and be grateful to the gods!”
Just as he opened the iron gate and glanced at the two or three newly-budded plants that were coming out in his little patch of garden, the owner of the pigsty, a ruffianly curmudgeon who earned his living in more than one disreputable way, took it into his head to pour out a great bucket of swill into the pig-trough, an action that caused so ear-piercing a volley of bestial shrieks, that Wolf stopped aghast, his heart almost ceasing to beat, and, turning his head, threw an agitated glance toward that sinister little erection of tarred boardings.
His first idea was that one of the animals was being slaughtered; but the sound of voracious gobbling which now reached his ears reassured him.
“He’s only feeding them,” he said to himself, and entered the house. In the kitchen he found Gerda already beginning her bowl of porridge.
“What’s the news, Wolf?” she enquired, with the indistinct voice of a greedy child, turning, as she did so, her cream-clogged spoon upside-down in her mouth, so as to lick it clean. “What’s this you were going to tell me?”
“Guess, sweetheart!” he said contentedly, emptying what was left of the cream-jug over his own oatmeal. “Nothing, in fact, could be better. Urquhart announced last night that he has decided to go slow with our History. You know what a hurry he’s been in? But he now says he’s decided to make a complete job of it, even if it takes five years to finish.”
The infantile sulkiness in Gerda’s face only deepened at his words, and with an impatient gesture she stretched out her arms and tossed back her head. Then she tightened the green ribbon with which she had fastened her locks, and fixed upon him a cloudy, satiric frown. She appeared so enchanting in her crossness, that Wolf forgot everything as he watched these movements, and for a moment he just looked at her in silence.
“You don’t think much of my news, then?” he said presently. “But you don’t realize how awkward it would have been if this confounded book had come to an end this Autumn. Where would we have got another hundred pounds from, eh, sweetheart? Tell me that!”
“A hundred pounds!” the girl muttered sarcastically.
“Yes, a hundred pounds,” he retorted. “Two-thirds of our income.”
He rose and moved to the stove, to get the kettle to refill their teapot.
“But that’s not all; so you needn’t look sour. There’s something much more amusing than that.” She waited impatiently now, and he went on. “Urquhart doesn’t want me over there this afternoon and Mother’s coming to tea.”
The girl’s sulkiness changed in a moment to something like pitiful dismay.
“Oh, Wolf!” she exclaimed. “This is the first time.”
“She’s been twice to lunch,” he said.
But Gerda’s eyes remained troubled and very wide open, and the corners of her underlip drooped.
“Darnley was here, too—both times!” she gasped. “We’ve never had her alone, and I’ve got no clothes for an afternoon.”
“No clothes?”
“You know what I mean, perfectly well,” she went on peevishly. “People like your mother don’t have the same things on in the morning as they do in the afternoon.”
Wolf watched her with narrowing eyelids. He recalled that first walk with her up the slope of Babylon Hill, and his pursuit of her among the earthworks of Poll’s Camp. Why did all girls introduce into life an element of the conventional—into that life of which they themselves were the most mysterious expression? He became suddenly aware of the existence, in the beautiful head opposite him, of a whole region of interests and values that had nothing to do with lovemaking and nothing to do with romance. Was love itself, then, and all its mysteries, only a kind of magic gate leading into a land full of alien growths and unfamiliar soils?
“Gerda, my sweet Gerda!” he cried reproachfully. “How absurd! What does it matter? It’s only my mother. She must take us as she finds us.”
The girl pouted and smiled scornfully.
“That’s all you know!” she retorted. “Your mother’s a woman, isn’t she?”
Wolf stared at her. Was there then some queer inner world, parallel to the one that was important to him, wherein women encountered one another, and without whose ritual life was completely unreal to them? “God!” he thought to himself. “If this is so, the sooner I get the secret of this ‘other reality,’ the better for both Gerda and me!”
“Well, I only beg one thing of you, sweetheart,” he went on aloud, “and that is that you don’t try and make those funny scones again that you made for Christie. I’ll get some halfpenny buns or teacakes at Pimpernel’s.”
“Halfpenny buns!” she repeated contemptuously.
He began to raise his voice. “They’re the very nicest things! How silly you are! But I don’t care what you get, as long as there’s plenty of thin bread-and-butter.”
“I can’t cut it! I never could cut it!” she cried helplessly, her enormous grey eyes beginning to fill with tears.
It was then that Wolf began to realize that it was necessary to be as indulgent to the “realities” of this alien array of feelings as if they had been those of a being of a different planet. He got up from his seat and walked round their square kitchen-table, a table that according to his own caprice had been left bare of any covering. Standing over the girl, he bent her head back with both his hands and kissed her many times.
It seemed to him, as he did this, that he had done this very same thing in another room, and even in another country. He remained motionless behind her for a moment when he had released her, and lifted his head. Where had all this occurred before? A queer feeling came over him as if she and he were acting a part in some fantastic dreamworld, and that he had only to make one enormous effort, to find he had destroyed for both of them the whole shadow-scenery of their life.
But Gerda, knowing nothing of what was passing in his mind, turned round in her chair and pushed him away with all the strength of her young arm.
“Don’t be so annoying, Wolf!” she cried. “There! I’m hungry, I tell you. Haven’t you got any eggs for us?”
He moved away obediently to the stove, made his arrangements for boiling three eggs—two for himself and one for her—and remained there on guard, his watch in his hand.
The audible ticking of his watch, as he concentrated his mind upon it, answered the louder ticking of the clock in the parlour across the passage. “Time again!” he sighed. And then he thought, “But I’ve got the power to deal with far more serious jolts to my happiness than this finding out that a girl’s ‘reality’ is not my ‘reality’!”
In a minute or two, when he had set a china eggcup in front of each of them and had placed a brown egg within hers and a white one in his own, and had resumed his seat, he found that his quick adjustment of the wheels and cogs of his mind had proved successful. “It doesn’t matter in the least,” he thought, “whether we understand each other or not. My existence is necessary to her, just as hers is to me. Neither of us can really spoil anything as long as that’s the case.”
Whatever secret ways Gerda had of adjusting the machinery of her mind, seemed to have been as successful as his own; for when she had satisfied her hunger and filled her teacup with strong, sweet tea, she lifted her head quite cheerfully.
“I’ll go to Pimpernel’s myself,” she said. “I saw something there yesterday that I’m sure your mother would like. And I’ll make toast. That’ll be just as nice as bread-and-butter.”
Wolf declared himself completely satisfied at this prospect.
“You go up now, sweetheart,” he said, “and finish dressing, and make the bed. I’ll wash up. I’ll just have time for that. There, do go quick! I don’t want anyone to knock at the door and find you like that. We’ve got to keep up the prestige of Preston Lane!”
He spoke jestingly, but there was an element of concern at the back of his mind. He had had some uncomfortable moments now and again, when tradesmen’s boys had come to the door at an early hour. He hated to think of their ménage being a laughingstock to all the Lob Torps and Bob Weevils of the town.
It was a complete puzzle to him the way in which Gerda made such a fuss about the conventions where his mother was concerned, while to the Bob Weevils of the place she let down every barrier as completely as if she’d drifted into Blacksod from the primeval woods of Arcady.
As he watched her now, rushing upstairs like a young Maenad, he remembered how the fancy had come into his mind, that afternoon at Poll’s Camp, that the West-Saxon Torp blood in her had been crossed at some very early stage with an altogether different strain.
Hurriedly gathering the dishes together on the edge of the sink, he proceeded to do what would certainly not have passed unobserved by a more practical mistress of the house. He proceeded to hold cups, saucers, plates, bowls, knives, forks, and pots and pans under a tap of perfectly cold water, rubbing them and scraping them with his bare fingers, and then drying them violently—greasy as most of them were—with the kitchen-towel. As he did this, he caught a glimpse out of the window of a stunted little laburnum-tree, which grew in their backyard; and he noticed, as he had often noticed before, how one of its boughs was leafless and seemed to be stretching out, in a sorrowful, fumbling sort of way, towards their neighbour’s fence, above which grew a sturdy lilac-bush, covered now with glossy heart-shaped leaves.
On this occasion, however, for some unaccountable reason, the sight of this forlorn branch brought vividly to his mind the figure of Christie Malakite, as he had seen her that day, crouched in the castle-lane. And with that image there came to him—as if a door had unexpectedly opened in the remotest wall of his mind’s fortress—a deep, sickening craving, it was hard to tell for what—a craving that pierced him like the actual thrust of a spear. The bareness and tension of that extended branch had won his sympathy before; but today, as he rubbed the porridge-pot furiously with the greasy towel and emptied the hot kettle-water into it, the sight of the thing seemed to disturb the complacency of his whole being.
A minute or two later, when he saw it again from the window of their small privy, which abutted upon the same backyard, he got a sense of being hemmed in, burdened, besieged, while some vague, indistinct appeal, hard to define, was calling upon him for aid.
He moved out to the foot of the staircase, and, with his hand upon the bannister, stood motionless, lost in strange thoughts. These glimpses of certain fixed objects, seen daily, yet always differently, through bedroom-windows, scullery-windows, privy-windows, had, from his childhood, possessed a curious interest for him. It was as if he got from them a sort of runic handwriting, the “little language” of Chance itself, commenting upon what was, and is, and was to come. As he stood there, he could hear Gerda moving about upstairs, and he hesitated as to whether to run up and speak to her, or to go out, as he generally did, without further farewell.
He decided finally upon the latter course; something at the bottom of his mind, just then, making anything else seem strained and unnatural. Snatching up his oak-stick, therefore, he let himself out of the house with deliberate quietness, and walked with rapid steps down the road.
His way to the Grammar School led him past the confectioner’s shop; and at the sight of the name “Pimpernel” over the door, he decided to run in for a moment and see for himself if the particular teacakes that he had in mind were available that day.
Not finding what he wanted, he was on the point of going out again, when he heard a familiar voice proceeding from the interior part of the shop. It was too late to retreat. He was already recognized; and in another second he found himself face to face with Mrs. Torp. Gerda’s mother had been engaged in persuading old Ruth Pimpernel to sell her a loaf of yesterday’s bread at half-price.
Shaking hands vigorously with this uncongenial apparition, whose shrewish aspect was not modified by the dirty black bonnet she wore balanced on the top of her head, Wolf found himself propitiating the woman to the extreme limit of a somewhat unctuous geniality.
He had often noticed that when his blood had been quickened by rapid walking, he had a tendency to exaggerate his natural bonhomie to a degree that was almost fatuous.
“You haven’t come to see us for such a long while, Mrs. Torp,” he cried. “Gerda and I can’t get on without seeing something of you. It’s too ridiculous”—so he blundered on, in complete disregard of the sly expression in Mrs. Torp’s eyes, like the expression of a tethered dog leering at a hutch of tame hares—“it’s too ridiculous to have you in the same place and to see so little of you!”
It was impossible even for the perspicacity of Joan Torp to put down this blustering friendliness to its true account—to the pleasant glow, namely, diffused through Wolf’s veins by his rapid walk; and so, with a nearer approach to a benevolent grimace than he had ever seen on her grim features, she assured him with unhesitating emphasis that she would, “as sure as us be standing here, Mr. Solent,” drop in for tea that very afternoon at Preston Lane.
The appearance of the shopgirl with the stale loaf destined for the monument-maker’s table—Mr. Torp abominated stale bread—prevented the woman from detecting the cloud that descended on Wolf’s brow on receipt of this prompt acceptance of his hospitality. It was, indeed, only when he was hurrying out of the confectioner’s shop that he had the wit to turn round and fling back a suggestion that if Mrs. Torp went over there, now at once, her daughter would be very pleased to see her.
“I’ll leave it to Gerda,” he thought to himself. “She’ll manage it somehow.”
His mind, however, remained all that morning, as he sat at his desk in the Grammar School fourth-form room, asking questions about Edward Longshanks, teasingly preoccupied with this encounter.
“She may not go there at all,” he thought. “It isn’t her way to go there in the morning. They’re so funny, those two, about their houses. Well, we must chance it and hope for the best!”
And then, as he enlarged to his class upon that formidable black sarcophagus in Westminster Abbey, with its grim inscription, the under-flow of his mind kept fretting against all the little incidents that had led to this annoying issue.
“If I hadn’t stayed so long at that confounded privy-window, I should have got out of Pimpernel’s before she came in. And if I’d stopped to say goodbye to Gerda, she’d have gone before I got there at all. Damn! It’s like the rope, the water, the fire, the dog, and the old woman getting home from market.”
When his class was let out and he himself escaped into the street at half-past twelve, it occurred to him that it was curious how faint an impact upon his consciousness this business of teaching history made. He was clever enough to do the whole job with the surface of his mind. “What the devil do those boys think of me?” he wondered grimly. “I forget their existence as soon as I’m out of sight of them.”
He met Darnley Otter, at that moment, issuing forth from his Latin lesson with a pile of papers in his hand.
Darnley greeted him with more than his usual cordiality; and as Wolf looked into his friend’s strangely-coloured eyes, he felt that peculiar sensation of relief which men are wont to feel when they encounter each other after the confusion of sex-conflicts.
Darnley laid his free hand on his friend’s arm, and they moved down the street together; but for a while Wolf heard nothing of what he was saying, so occupied was he with a sudden question, gaping like a crack in a hot stubble-field in the very floor of his mind, that had just then obtruded itself. Was he really “in love,” in the proper sense of that word, with his sweet bedfellow? “But very likely I could never be ‘in love’ in that sense with anyone,” he said to himself as they walked along.
And then he became aware that Darnley had been speaking to him for some while.
“I don’t see why I shouldn’t take you,” he was saying now. “I would, like a shot, if she hadn’t been so funny the other day when I talked about you. But I expect there’s nothing in that! Perhaps you hurt her feelings in some way. She’s a queer little oddity. I found that out long ago. One has to be awfully careful.”
These words, and other words before them, now began to penetrate Wolf’s consciousness, as they might have done with a person recovering from an anaesthetic.
“Sorry,” he muttered apologetically, standing stock-still on the pavement. “I wasn’t listening.”
Darnley stroked his pointed beard and looked him up and down.
“You’re boy-drunk, poor devil,” he murmured sympathetically. “It does take time to wear off. You’re repeating to yourself what you’d like to have retorted to Rintoul Minor when he made you feel a fool. I’m often like that myself.”
“No, I’m not,” protested the other. “But what were you saying?”
“Nothing very startling,” said Darnley quietly, pulling him forward by the arm. “It’s only I thought I’d take you with me to Christie’s to lunch. Gerda won’t mind, once in a way, will she?”
Wolf drew his heavy eyebrows down so low that his startled gaze gleamed out at his companion like lantern-light from a thatched shed. “I … don’t … suppose so,” he muttered hesitatingly.
The truth was that Darnley’s suggestion had set something vibrating violently deep down within him, like the thuds of a buried drum played by an earth-gnome. So this was what things had been tending to since he had caught sight of that laburnum-branch?
Darnley smiled and shrugged his shoulders.
“Don’t say any more,” he cried. “I see you don’t want to come. Well! Off with you, then … back to your Saxon beauty. Christie’s expecting me, anyway.”
But Wolf held him with an appeal in his eye.
“It’s only that Gerda and I have got special things to do today,” he said. “Under ordinary conditions I’d have loved to come.”
Darnley looked at him gravely. “No bad news, I hope?” he said.
Wolf was silent. All manner of queer fancies passed, like the shadows of rooks over a pond, across the surface of his brain. One thing particularly he found himself dwelling upon. “Didn’t seem friendly to me, eh?” And he recalled the only two occasions on which he had seen Christie alone since his marriage.
On both those occasions she had avoided all allusion to the day of the horse-show. But she had been self-possessed and natural, had laughed at his jests, had talked freely with him about Mattie, had not even drawn back from a passing reference to Olwen. And though her allusions to Gerda were faint and slight, they were friendly and sympathetic. But Wolf remembered well how he had experienced a profound astonishment at the abysses of pride and reserve into which this frail being had the power of retreating.
“Gerda has been a bit surprised,” he said at last, observing that Darnley was growing impatient to be off, “that a friend like Christie hasn’t been in to see us more often.”
His companion freed his sleeve from the nervous clutch with which Wolf quite unconsciously had seized it.
“That’s silly of Gerda,” he said curtly. “She ought to understand Christie better than that. Christie never goes out to see people. People have to come and see her. Look here, Solent”—and as he spoke, a gleam of boyish eagerness came into his face—“why don’t you run back home now, have a bit of lunch, and then both you and Gerda come round to Christie’s? I’ll tell her you’re coming. She’ll keep some hot chocolate for you. She makes splendid hot chocolate.”
Wolf hesitated. “We’ve got my mother coming to tea,” he said. “And perhaps someone else too,” he added, thinking of Mrs. Torp.
“That’s all right. There’ll be plenty of time for that. It’s not half-past two, anyway. Do go off now, there’s a good chap; and be sure you bring Gerda.”
Wolf remained silent, uncertain, ill at ease, tapping the ground with his stick.
“All right,” he said at last. “I’ll do as you say. We shan’t be long over our lunch, that’s certain. But make it plain to Christie that we’re only coming for a very short time. Tell her we’ve got to get back to tea. That’ll reassure her,” he added sardonically, “if we get on her nerves.”
“Don’t be an ass, Solent,” was his friend’s farewell-remark as they turned to go their different ways.
It took Wolf as a rule exactly twenty minutes to walk from the Grammar School gate to his own door; but this time he lengthened the way by debouching into Monmouth Street, where there were no shops and scarcely any traffic.
The hot June sun was shining down almost perpendicularly on the warm, uneven cobblestones of this quiet alley, stones that left room for the occasional outcropping of thin moss-soft blades of grass. Wolf walked along slowly, under the high brick wall which enclosed the pleasant garden of a certain Lawyer Gault, a remote relative of Selena’s. He came to a spot where the branches of a tall lime-tree just inside the lawyer’s garden threw a dreamy pattern of motionless shadows upon the stones at his feet. There he stood still, while those dark patterns upon the sunlit ground made that portion of the earth seem porous and insubstantial. And then again that drum-like beating in the depths of his heart brought up the vision of Christie Malakite, huddled and crouched, as he had seen her on the day of the Fair.
Making no attempt this time to restrain his thoughts, he discovered, as he gave himself up to his mental disloyalty, a curious emotional phenomenon. He discovered that the peculiar glamour which had always hovered for him like a diaphanous cloud round the impersonal idea of girlhood, had concentrated itself upon the image of Christie. He plunged into a very strange aspect of his feelings, as he stood on those cobblestones and stared at those dark shadows. The thought of Gerda’s warmth gave him a voluptuous thrill, direct, earthy, full of honest and natural desire. But he recognized now that there hovered over the personality of this other girl something more subtle than this—nothing less, in fact, than that evasive aura of mysterious girlishness—the platonic idea, so to speak, of the mystery of all young girls, which was to him the most magical thing in the whole world. What had drawn him from the beginning to Gerda had been her wonderful beauty, and after that her original personality, her childish character. He could see Gerda’s face now, at this moment, before him—he could catch the tones of her voice. He could feel how lovely she was, as he held her and caressed her. Christie’s face, on the contrary, was all vague in his memory; her voice was vague; the touch of her hand was vague. It was hard to believe that he had ever had his arms about her. And yet it was Christie who had drawn into herself all those floating intimations of the mystery of a girl’s soul, gathered here and there, like cowslips in green valleys, which were above everything so precious to him.
The chatter of a couple of starlings that sank to the ground behind the wall, quarrelling and scolding, brought him at last to himself. He pulled down his straw-hat over his eyes and moved off homewards.
When he opened the door of Number Thirty-Seven, he found Gerda covered from head to foot in a print apron, her head bound up in a green scarf, brushing the floor of their parlour.
“You can’t come in now,” she said, “unless you want to sit in the bedroom. I’ll be doing the kitchen presently. It’s no good your going in there.”
“Good Lord, child!” he expostulated, coughing and sneezing with exaggerated emphasis, as he propped up his stick in its accustomed corner. “The place will be covered with dust! Why can’t you let things alone? My mother would never have noticed whether the room was brushed or not. It’ll take hours for all this to settle!”
She rested on her great broom and surveyed him through her cloud of sun-illumined dust-motes. Under her gaze Wolf felt his actual body stiffen into a pose of clumsy awkwardness. He experienced a sense of humiliating self-consciousness. He felt like a fool, and a treacherous fool. The gaze she fixed upon him was the kind of gaze the Olympian dawn-goddess might have fixed upon her human lover at the moment when he first betrayed the tricky and shifty mortality of his race. He never altogether forgot that experience. It made a hole in his armour which never, to the end of his life, quite closed up. Henceforth, in all his thoughts of himself, he had to allow for a weak and shaky spot in the very groundwork of his character—a weakness that nothing short of the clairvoyance of a woman could ever have laid bare!
“All right,” he murmured stupidly. “I’ll go wherever you want me to go, my dear.” And when he found that she still watched him with a sort of pondering detachment, he made a hopeless effort to read her thoughts.
Her look seemed to express resentment, superiority, irony; and yet there was tenderness in it too, and a sort of pitiful indulgence. It was one of those looks in which everything that is most obscure in the relation between two people rises to the surface and can find no expression in human words. All he knew was that this look of hers let him off and did not let him off; though what she could know of the vague, secret thoughts that had been his that day, he could not conceive!
“I’ll go anywhere you like, Gerda,” he repeated lamely; and in order to break this spell, he took up a cloth duster she had laid on the back of a chair, and made a motion to dust the chimneypiece.
She relaxed her reverie at this, and resumed her work without taking further notice of him. This enabled him to turn round again, and, with the duster still in his hand, watch furtively every one of her gestures. The apron she’d twisted so tightly about her body, the bit of green muslin she had tied so quaintly around her head, threw the whiteness of her skin and the softness of her flesh into extraordinary relief. She went on vigorously wielding the broom with her rounded arms, the movements which she made displaying the loveliness of her shoulders and the suppleness of her flanks, till Wolf began to forget everything except the voluptuous fascination of looking at her.
This had not gone on very long before he became aware that she knew perfectly well exactly in what mood he was watching her. Every now and then she would straighten her body to rest her muscles, and then, as she lifted her hands to readjust the green muslin at the back of her head, the contours of her young breasts under the tight-fitting apron assumed the nobility of Pheidian sculpture. Whenever she did this she glanced at him under dreamy, abstracted eyelids, and she seemed to know well that what of all things he wanted most at that moment was just to make rough, reckless, self-obliterating love to her. And she seemed to know, too, that if she let him do that, just then, some indescribable advantage she had won over him would be altogether lost. Across an unfathomable gulf she shot these glances at him, the thick dust-gendered sun-motes flashing and gyrating between them like the spilled golden sands of some great overturned hourglass.
Under the pressure of his conflicting feelings, Wolf’s heart contracted within him; and the pride of his threatened life-illusion gathered about it, like broken bubbles of quicksilver gathering against the sides of a globe of crystal.
At last, throwing down the duster, he sprang towards her, driven by the blind, unconscious cunning of a predatory animal and by sheer, exasperated desire. But the girl slipped away from him, laughing like a hunted oread, and, lifting her great broom between them, escaped round the edge of the parlour-table, from which she had removed the cloth. Red in the face now, and breathing hard and fast, he pursued her obstinately; and they both ran, panting and hot, round and round that polished expanse of wood, that mocked him like a shining shield. In her flight she dropped the broom, and he in his clumsy pursuit stumbled and almost fell over it.
Then he gave up; because, in a single flash of the dark-lantern of his self-esteem, he saw this whole incident between them just as Bob Weevil would have seen it, had he been pressing his inquisitive face against their windowpane. But as they stood there, stock-still, panting like two animals and staring at each other across the polished wood, it came into his head that if there had been nothing more subtle than that table between them, this game of theirs would have been full of a rich delight for both of them, Bob Weevil or no Bob Weevil!
Heavily he drew his breath, watching the tiny drops of perspiration on her forehead, and her panting bosom. “She’s a complete stranger to me!” he said to himself, with a puzzled sigh.
“You’ll never catch me like that, Wolf,” gasped Gerda, with a melodious chuckle; “so you’d better give up and admit you’re beaten.”
But he thought to himself: “She thinks she’s acting the naughty child. She thinks she’s ruffled my dignity. She thinks I’m a pompous ass, who can’t play naturally with a girl in that sort of way.” He moved from the table, and, throwing himself into a wicker-chair, lit a cigarette. “But I could, I could,” he thought, “if only—oh, damn all this business of loving girls! It’s getting out of my control; it’s getting too much for me!”
Through their open window came the clear, ringing notes of the thrush in the ash-tree, along with that curious scent of honeysuckle mixed with pigs’ dung which was their familiar atmosphere. She, too, heard the thrush, and, balancing the broom against a chair, walked to the window and leaned against the side of it, her profile toward him.
“What would I feel,” he said to himself, “if she started whistling her blackbird-song now?”
But Gerda displayed no desire for whistling. Her face looked pale and a little sad; and leaning there, with her forehead resting upon one of her bare arms as it lay along the woodwork of the window, she seemed to be lost in concentrated thought.
Wolf felt a sudden longing to go across to her and comfort her—comfort her about those errant feelings of his own that it was impossible to believe she had intercepted in their secret passage through his brain! He couldn’t, surely, at that moment, announce to her Darnley’s plan?
What he actually did was neither to go up to her nor to tell her about the projected visit. He rose to his feet, and said abruptly: “Well! What about lunch, my dear?”
At this remark she lifted up her head from her arm with a jerk, dropped her hand to her side, and, giving him one quick look of unspeakable reproach, went out without a word into the kitchen.
“Damn!” he thought to himself. “She can’t be a witch! She can’t have the power to read a person’s thoughts! Besides, what did I think? Nothing beyond what everyone thinks sometimes; wild, crazy, outrageous nonsense! It must be her mother. That old trot must have come round, after all.”
He resumed his seat in the wicker-chair; but he felt too miserable even to light a cigarette.
His obscure distress swathed every one of the thrush’s notes with a thick soot-coloured wrapping, so that they flapped at him like so many black flags. On the gusts of hedge-scent and ditch-scent his discomfort rose and fell, rocking him up and down in swart desolation.
“I wish I’d gone straight up to her at the window just now,” he said to himself. “I can’t bear to have her looking like that. Christ saw a man under a fig-tree, or whatever it was; and I suppose a girl can see a man under a lime-tree and read his thoughts like a map!”
He threw off his gloom as well as he could, and walked slowly into the kitchen. There he found her absentmindedly laying the table for a meal of bread and cheese. He mechanically started helping her, getting out the knives and forks from the dresser-drawer and uncorking a bottle of beer.
When the meal was ready she untied her apron, removed the muslin from her head, washed her hands at the sink, and then, instead of taking her place opposite him, stood wavering and helpless in the middle of the room.
“I think I’ll go out for a breath of air,” she announced. “I must have swallowed too much dust. I’m not hungry.”
Wolf had already taken his seat; and, as she spoke, instead of moving away from him, as her remark suggested, she made a queer little helpless movement towards him. This time he did know what to do. He jumped up and sprang towards her, and hugged her tightly to his heart, overcoming her weak resistance, pressing her cheek, now quickly wet with tears, against his own. They remained thus for some seconds, with their arms round each other, but without a word, leaving the parlour-clock and the incorrigible thrush to deal as they pleased with the passing of time.
At length he withdrew his clasp, and, making her sit down at the table, filled her glass with foaming ale.
The mellowness of the drink, combined with the obvious sincerity of his embrace, seemed to drive away the unhappy mood that obsessed her. She turned to the meal before them and began eating with relish. As they ate they talked quietly of what they would prepare for his mother’s tea. Wolf found it wise at present to say nothing of Mrs. Torp.
When they were satisfied, however, and after he had handed her a cigarette—for it always amused him to see the childishly incompetent way Gerda smoked—he plunged boldly into the matter of their visit to the bookseller’s shop. With one part of his heart he wished this project at the devil; but he said to himself it would be absurd to disappoint Darnley.
“If you’re willing not to wash up and not to dress till we get back, we could easily go for just an hour. We really owe Christie a visit; and Darnley’s being there makes an excuse.”
“Why ought we to go to Christie’s? She ought to come and see us!”
“Gerda, you know how it is! You know what she’s like. Besides, we’ve only asked her that once, when Bob and Lobbie were here. Let’s go now; there’s a dear girl! We’ll have plenty of time to get cleaned up before tea.”
Gerda seemed to struggle with herself for a moment; and then she yielded with the most charming grace. “All right,” she said, getting up; “only we must run in to Pimpernel’s on the way.”
Wolf’s spirits rose high as they left the house. He chuckled sardonically in his heart at his own elation. “The truth must be,” he said to himself, “that I’m simply infatuated with both of them—that I want to snatch at Christie and yet not lose my hold on my sweet Gerda.”
The sight of the shopgirl in Pimpernel’s, however, brought down his happiness a great many pegs. He had completely forgotten Mrs. Torp.
But he said nothing till they were well out of the shop, and well on their way down High Street. Then he began: “Oh, I met your mother this morning, Gerda. We talked a bit, and I can’t remember how it came about, but she went off finally with the idea that I’d asked her to tea this afternoon. And I’m afraid I didn’t mention to her that my mother’s coming; so we’d better be prepared for her turning up.”
The effect of this information was startling. Gerda drew her arm away from him and stopped dead-still where they were, which was in front of a butcher’s shop; and they let the afternoon marketers jostle past them unheeded.
“You … have asked … Mother … to tea!” she gasped; and he was staggered at the dismay upon her face.
“Well?” he said, pulling her into the butcher’s porch to avoid the crowd. “It won’t be so very awful, will it? My mother can be adaptable and decent enough at a pinch.”
Gerda looked at him with such flashing eyes that he drew back as if she had hit him.
“Are you mad, Wolf?” she whispered hoarsely. “I can’t understand you today! What’s the matter with you? You rush off without a word this morning. You come back looking as if you’d met a ghost. You drag me out here to see your friend, who wants me no more than a cat! And now this, on the top of everything! It’s too much! I tell you it’s too much! I’m going home.” And suiting her action to her words, she broke away from him and began rapidly retracing her steps.
Wolf ran after her and caught her by the arm.
“Gerda! Gerda darling!” he cried, regardless of the people who were passing them. “I can’t bear this. Let me come back with you. I don’t care a damn about seeing Christie!”
“I won’t have you come with me, Wolf. I won’t! I won’t! Do you want me to make a scene in the street? Go to Christie’s, I tell you! That’s where you belong. I’ve known you wanted to go to her ever since she came that day with the boys. Go! Go! Go! I won’t have you with me!” And she started off almost at a run, her face white and her eyes dazed and staring.
Wolf remained motionless and stood watching her while long minutes passed over his head. It seemed impossible that that should be his Gerda, going off in a rage! But even as he stood hesitating, her figure disappeared among the people.
He turned wearily round then and resumed his walk down the street in absentminded gloom. He hardly knew what he was doing; but he had a vague idea of wandering about the streets for a time, and then returning to Preston Lane. His feet carried him, however, steadily on till he found himself opposite the bookseller’s shop.
“In for a penny, in for a pound,” he said to himself. And then the thoughts which he believed at that moment were what dominated his action formed themselves in his brain into some such words as these: “I’ve absolutely no heart for seeing Christie now, or Darnley either! But I suppose it would be an absurd piling up of misunderstandings if I disappointed them.”
Grasping the handle of his stick tightly in his hand, and seeing Gerda’s stricken face and wild, tearless stare in the very midst of the doorway, he entered the shop.
He found the old man amidst a pile of books, murmuring with bent head over a volume bound in vellum, which he was showing to a customer, evidently a stranger to the place. Mr. Malakite did not hear him enter, and Wolf found himself looking with a queer interest at that bowed back and grizzled head. What did it feel like, as the days went on, to know that one possessed, only five miles away, a child like Olwen, the daughter of a daughter? Did the old man ever see Olwen? Did he know anything of the child’s thoughts? Did he want to know anything? A chance movement made by the customer brought Wolf now into the bookseller’s vision. A startled look passed for a second over the old man’s face, but he betrayed no other sign of embarrassment.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Solent,” he said quietly. “Have you come to see me or to see Miss Malakite?” And then, without waiting for an answer: “You’ll find her in the room upstairs. Mr. Otter has just gone.”
Wolf passed through the shop, and, hurriedly running up the little staircase, knocked at Christie’s door. The effect upon him of this unexpected news of Darnley’s departure was something beyond what he could possibly have foreseen. The stricken face of Gerda vanished completely, and Gerda herself became what his mother was, or what Miss Gault was, or what his father’s grave was—one of the fixed landmarks in his life’s landscape, but no longer the centre of his life. That hidden drum, which was neither exactly in his heart nor exactly in the pit of his stomach, beat so loudly as he waited at Christie’s door, that it seemed as if that oblong shape of discoloured wood, the very markings of which were voluble, were ready to open now upon something completely new to his experience. That word of the old man, “Mr. Otter has gone,” kept repeating itself in his mind as he waited. “Mr. Otter has gone. Mr. Otter has gone.” The phrase became a floating cloud of tremulous expectation.
When Christie did open the door, and they had taken each other’s hand, Wolf felt as if he had been doing nothing all his life but wait for this moment. He had the feeling that the man and girl who now proceeded to utter broken and fragmentary commonplaces to each other were acting as automatic figures behind whose gestures two long-separated spirits were rushing together.
Several seconds passed before Christie had the power to make a move to find a chair for herself or to give a sign for him to be seated; but when he did sink down at last, still talking of anything that came into his head, a sense of such relief swept into his soul that it was as if some spearhead, that had been in his flesh without his knowing it, for days and weeks, had suddenly been pulled out.
And then, without the least disturbance of the atmosphere of that small room, he suddenly found that those two nodding masks had vanished into thin air, and that there was no barrier of any sort left between the real Wolf and the real Christie. Naturally and easily he found himself taking for granted this strange new discovery of what was between them. He thought within himself: “She knows everything. I’ll leave everything to her.” And he suddenly discovered that he was talking freely and openly about all the people of his life, and about Gerda, too. He discovered that to talk to Christie was like talking to himself or thinking aloud. And he recalled how he had been struck, the very first time they met, by this ease and naturalness with which the lightest thought flowed back and forth between them.
And all the while, even as he was whimsically telling her about the unlucky tea-party arranged for that afternoon, the contour of her half-averted face bending over a piece of needlework she had blindly taken up, and the way her instep looked with the thin leather strap of her shoe across it, gave him a sensation completely different from anything he had ever known before. What he really felt was that this was the first feminine creature with whom he had ever been left alone. In comparison with this diffused and thrilling feeling, permeating everything around them, his amorousness for Gerda seemed like playful lust, directed toward some beautiful statue. The slender little figure before him, with those thin hands and those touchingly thin legs, drew into her personality, at that moment, every secret of girlhood that had ever troubled him. Coming to him like the fragrance of wood-mosses to a city-dweller, the consciousness that this dreamlike figure was really alive and tangible seemed to melt his bones within him. Those mystic syllables, “a girl,” “a young girl,” had always remained at the back of his mind like a precious well-watered flowerbed, but a bed empty of any living growth. Nothing, he now knew, in his life with Gerda had stirred the earth of that mystic bed. But here, in the centre of that bed, was a living, breathing plant, making everything around it enchanted and transparent by the diffused loveliness of its presence. This passive entity in front of him, with her honey-pale oval face, her long eyelashes, her thin legs, her faintly outlined childish figure, was the only true, real, actual living girl in all the earth.
The minutes slipped by, and Wolf found himself, to his surprise, even talking to her about Olwen. So far from this extraordinary topic agitating her, she seemed to find a deep relief in speaking of it.
“Were you old enough to realize what was going on between them?” Wolf asked her at last.
Christie nodded her head and smiled a little. “The odd thing is,” she said gently, “that there never seemed to me anything strangely unnatural in it. I don’t think Mother ever was the right person for Father. I think from her earliest childhood there was a peculiar link between him and my sister.”
“But it killed your mother, didn’t it?” murmured Wolf.
Christie was silent for a moment, a queer, pondering frown on her face.
“I don’t think so,” she said in a low voice. “Everyone said so; but I don’t believe it. I think it had begun long before that. It wasn’t she who did it.”
These last words were hardly audible.
Wolf pressed her.
“Who did it, then?”
Christie looked at him gravely.
“Do you believe in spirits?” she asked.
He laughed a little.
“Oh, no more than in anything else!” he said.
“My mother was Welsh,” she went on. “She used to tell us the wildest stories about her ancestors. Once she actually told us she was descended from Merlin. Merlin’s mother was a nun. Did you know that, Wolf?”
“No wonder you’re a bit inhuman,” he said. And then, after a pause: “Did you and your sister write to each other after they sent her away? Was she unhappy about Olwen?”
Christie’s brown eyes became for a minute fixed upon vacancy, as if she were scrutinizing some faraway mental image. When she turned them upon him, however, they had an angry and yet humorous gleam.
“I sent her money to come back,” she said. “I would have had her here in spite of them. Her last letter—I’ll show it to you one day—was full of excitement. If I’d been as old as I am now, they should never have sent her away.”
“Did Selena Gault do it?” asked Wolf.
The girl nodded. “She and Mr. Smith. They had the law on their side.” She paused and drew a long breath. “Law or no law,” she cried, passionately, with flushed cheeks, “if I’d been older I’d have stopped them! I was too young,” she added.
Wolf got up from his seat and stood regarding her. Every aspect of her figure, every flicker upon her face, gave him the feeling that he was regarding a young aspen-tree, porous to windblown alternations of light and shadow.
“It’s wonderful to be able to talk freely to anyone as I can with you … now we’re alone.”
“I sent Darnley away,” was all she said.
These words of hers hung suspended in the air between them. They were so sweet to Wolf that he felt unwilling to make the least response. He just allowed them to evaporate, syllable by syllable, into the midsummer warmth of that pleasant room. Christie’s eyelids drooped over the piece of sewing she held in her hands, and he noticed that she was turning this strip of muslin over and over between her fingers, smoothing it out upon her lap, first one side and then the other. The poignancy of her shyness increased his awareness of the suspense between them; and to loosen the spell he turned his head a little and glanced at the mantelpiece, on which was a china bowl, full of bluebells, late, long-stalked primroses, and pink campions and meadow-orchids. His own mind kept beating itself against the unknown—against that fatal next moment which drew to itself the dust-motes of the air, the scent of the wildflowers, the warm wind blowing in through the open window.
“Will she let me make love to her? Will she let me?” was the burden of his thought; and as he stared at that bunch of flowers, especially at one solitary bluebell that hung down over the brim of the white bowl and had gathered a tinge of faint rose-carmine upon its hyacinthine bloom, he felt as though the “to be or not to be” of that tense moment depended upon chance as inscrutable, as fluctuating, as the light, falling this way, falling that way—light and shadow wavering together—upon that purple-blue at the bowl’s edge.
Never had he been more aware of the miracle of flower-petals, of the absolute wonder of this filmy vegetable fabric, so much older, just as it is so much more lovely, in the history of our planet than the flesh of beasts or the feathers of birds or the scales of fishes!
The girl’s words, “I sent Darnley away,” seemed to melt into that wildflower bunch she had picked and placed there; and the pallor of the primroses, the perilous, arrowy faintness of their smell, became his desire for her; and the rough earth-mould freedom of the campion-stalks, with their wood-sturdy pink buds, became the lucky solitude she had made for him!
“Will she let me make love to her?” The longing to risk the first movement toward his purpose struggled now in his mind with that mysterious restraint, so tenuous and yet so strong, of the girl’s obscure embarrassment.
“Did you pick those flowers yesterday?” he broke out suddenly; and he was secretly surprised at the loudness of his own voice.
“The day before,” she murmured; and then, without closing her mouth, which, with the droop of her underlip, took on an almost vacant look, she frowned a little, as she fixed her steady gaze full upon him.
His own eyes plunged once more into the green-shadowed depths of that midsummer nosegay. Its pale primroses seemed to sway, in the wind, over their crumpled leaves, as they would have done where she had actually picked them among the wood-rubble and the fungus-growths of their birthplace. The moist bluebell-stalks, so full of liquid greenness beneath their heavy blooms, seemed to carry his mind straight into the hazel-darkened spaces where she had found them. These also belonged to the embarrassment of that figure beside him. These also, with the cool greenery of the sturdy campions, were the very secret of that “next moment,” which floated now, with the mocking sun-motes, untouched and virginal in the air about them.
Wolf knew well enough the peculiar limitations of his own nature. He knew well enough that any great surge of what is called “passion” was as impossible to him as was any real remorse about making love. What he felt was an excitement that trembled on the margin—on the fluctuating fine edge—between amorous desire for the slim frame of this mysterious girl and the thrilling attraction of unexplored regions in her soul.
His feeling was like a brimming stream between reedy banks, where a wooden moss-covered dam prevents any spring-flood, but where the water, making its way round the edge of the obstacle, bends the long, submerged grasses before it, as it sweeps forward.
Two images troubled him just a little—Gerda’s white, tense face as it had looked when she left him on the street, and, with this, a vague uncomfortable memory of the figure on the Waterloo steps. But, in his intensely heightened consciousness of this “suspended” moment, he deliberately steered the skiff of his thought away from both those reefs.
Suddenly he found himself risen from his seat and standing against the mantelpiece! He lifted the flowers to his face; and then, putting down the bowl, he inserted his fingers in it, pressing them down between the stalks into the water. He noticed that the water felt warm to his touch, like the water of a sun-warmed pool; and the fantastic idea came into his head that by making this gesture he was in some occult way invading the very soul of the girl who had arranged them there. Christie may or may not have read his thoughts. At any rate, he now became aware that she was standing beside him, and with deft, swift touches was correcting the rough confusion he had made in her nosegay.
“The bluebell-scent is the one that dominates,” he murmured. “You smell them, and see if I’m not right!”
As she leaned forward, he allowed his hand to slide caressingly down her side, drawing her slender body, with a scarcely perceptible pressure, against his own.
His heart was beating fast now, and a delicious predatory thrill was shivering through his nerves. Christie made not the least attempt to extricate herself from his caresses. She permitted him to bend her slim body this way and that way in his wanton excitement. But when he kissed her, she bent her neck so far round that it was her cheek and not her lips he kissed; and soon after that she slipped away from him and sank down exhausted in her former seat.
The look she gave him now, as they stared at each other, confused and out of breath, was completely inscrutable to him.
“You’re not annoyed with me, Christie?” he panted.
There was a flicker of anger in her eyes at this.
“Of course not,” she answered. “What do you take me for? I’m not as mean as that. I’m not a puritanical fool.”
“Well, then … well, then?” he muttered, approaching her chair and standing over her.
“I’m not one least bit annoyed with you,” she repeated.
The faint flush that had now appeared in her cheeks, and the complicated wistfulness of her expression, disarmed and enchanted him. He stooped down to her and stroked with the tips of his fingers the white blue-veined skin under her lace wristbands; but as he looked at her now, there was a certain virginal detachment about her thin ankles and about those lace-ruffled hands which irritated and provoked him by its inhuman remoteness.
“You puzzle me completely,” he remarked, returning rather awkwardly to his former seat and surveying her with a humorous frown.
She lifted up her head from her work. “Well? Why not? We haven’t known each other very long.”
Her words released his pent-up irritation.
“You make me feel funny, Christie,” he said. “As if we’d lost each other in a wood.”
She held her head very high at this and her eyes grew defiant.
“I know I’m no good at these things, Wolf. I never have been. Girls are supposed to carry off moments like this. I don’t know how they do it. I seem to be completely lacking in that sort of tact.”
His irritation increased as he found it impossible to follow her thought.
“Tact?” he reechoed sarcastically. “Good Lord! Tact is the last thing I want from you.”
She spoke gravely now, but with evident vexation.
“What’s the use of talking like this, Wolf? It’s growing only too clear that we don’t understand each other.”
His only retort to this was once more to murmur the word “tact” with a grim iteration.
Her brown eyes looked really angry now.
“Why are men so stupid?” she cried. “When I said that, I meant pretending something that wasn’t my real self. It’s because I’ve been absolutely natural with you that you’ve got angry with me.”
They were both silent after this, and Wolf stared at the half-open window, through which the summer wind was blowing into the room in little, eddying gusts. Christie took up her sewing; and the stir of her thin fingers and the waving of the light curtains were the only movements in that flower-scented air.
By slow degrees, as he surreptitiously watched her, the harmony of his mind began to come back; and with this harmony there came in upon him from all that green West Country landscape stretching away toward the Severn on one side and toward the Channel on the other, a sort of dumb, inarticulate reproach. What were they doing, he and this girl, who were, as he well divined, so exquisitely adapted to understand each other, letting themselves be divided by such straws, such puffballs of difference?
From fading cuckooflowers by the banks of the Lunt, from brittle mother-of-pearl shells, wet and glittering, on the Weymouth sands, from the orange-speckled bellies of great newts in Lenty Pond, there came to him, between those waving curtains, a speechless protest. Brief was his life … brief was Christie Malakite’s life. … Times like this at best would be rare. He could see himself returning to his tea-party and letting it all go! He could see Christie pouring out tea for her father and letting it all go! Perhaps—such was his pride and such was hers—this June afternoon, which might have been, but for this trivial discord, as perfect as a green bough, would stand out in his memory peeled and jagged, its sap all running out, its leaves drooping.
“Forgive me, Christie,” he said gravely. “Please forgive me and don’t think any more about it.”
The girl looked up from her work, her hands folded in her lap.
“You don’t mean,” she said slowly, “because of that?”
Her nod of the head in the direction of the mantelpiece, where he had first caressed her, made clear to him what her words implied.
He got up from his chair and stood in front of her, looking down at her lifted face.
“No,” he said. “I didn’t mean because of ‘that.’ I meant because we misunderstood each other; which was all my fault.”
Christie began to smile. “I’m not prudish or unfeeling in things like that,” she said. “But I’ve a queer nature, Wolf. I love the romance of being in love, and I like you, Wolf, better than anyone I’ve ever met; and I like you to make love to me. It’s only … it’s only that—with the life I’ve had and the mother I had—I seem to have none of an ordinary girl’s feelings in these things.”
Wolf began pacing up and down the room.
“I’m queer myself, Christie,” he said after a pause, stopping once more in front of her. “So there we are! It appears that we’re a fair pair! And if you want to know what I feel at this moment, I’ll tell you. I feel deliciously happy. You are a witch, Christie, and I don’t wonder your mother maintained she was descended from Merlin. I feel I could tell you every secret thought I have in the world. And so, by God, I will! It’s an incredible chance that I should have found you.”
He threw his cigarette into the fire and walked to the window.
“What a view you’ve got here!” he said. “That’s the corner of Babylon Hill, isn’t it?”
The window was already open at the top; but he pulled it down as far as it would go, and leaned out of it, looking across the entanglement of slate roofs to the green incline beyond.
“The wind’s northeast, isn’t it?” he remarked.
She got up and came over to him and stood beside him, and presently he felt her fingers slip into his own.
“North-northeast,” she said; and these words, when he thought of them afterwards, brought back every flicker of his feelings, as he stood stiffly there clutching her hand.
“Where does that lane go?” he asked. “Do you see what I mean? That narrow little one below those Scotch firs.”
“Over there?” the girl questioned. “To the left of Poll’s Camp, do you mean?”
“Yes … there … just there … where that clump of bushes is!”
“That’s Gwent Lane,” she answered. “And it leads to a whole maze of lanes further on. I’m fond of going to the Gwent Lanes. You hardly ever meet anyone there. It’s as if they had been designed to keep traffic away and strangers away. Sometimes on Summer days when Father doesn’t want me, I take my lunch and a book and stay in the Gwent Lanes all day. I often never meet a soul.”
She was silent for a second or two; and he realized that a crowded mass of personal memories was flowing through her mind.
“Some lovely afternoons I’ve had,” she went on, “sitting with my back to a gate and looking at the hedge-parsley. When the corn’s yellow and the poppies are out, I always sit inside the field, with my parasol over my book. I can smell the peculiar bitter smell now of the elder-leaves behind me.”
She drew her fingers away from him and made of her two hands a support for her chin upon the woodwork of the open window. Wolf thought this chin of hers was the smallest he had ever seen. He, too, remained silent, thinking of similar memories of his own, secret and solitary and personal; and he was astonished to note how natural it seemed to both of them, this deliberate indulgence in egoistic recollections.
“North-northeast, did you say?” His voice sounded irrelevant even to his own ears. In some queer way he felt as if he had been sharing these furtive physical memories with the girl at his side. He even felt as if their having shared them had been a kind of lovemaking more subtle and delicate than any erotic dalliance.
He felt as if he could share with this elfin creature a thousand feelings that no other person could possibly understand—share with her all those profoundly physical sensations—and yet mystical, too—that made up the real undercurrent of his whole life.
“She would understand my ‘mythology,’ ” he said to himself. “No one but she would; no one!” And then he thought: “I believe my life is going to open out now, as if I really had some invisible tutelary Power directing me!”
They turned away simultaneously from the window, and once more sat down.
“Do you ever feel,” he said, “as if one part of your soul belonged to a world altogether different from this world—as if it were completely disillusioned about all the things that people make such a fuss over and yet were involved in something that was very important?”
She looked straight into his face. “I wouldn’t put it like that,” she said. “But I’ve always known what it was to accept an enormous emptiness round me, echoing and echoing, and I sitting there in the middle, like a paper-doll reflected in hundreds of mirrors.”
Wolf screwed up his eyes and bit his underlip.
“You haven’t been as happy in your mind as I’ve been in my mind,” he said with a kind of wistfulness; “but I often feel as if I were unfairly privileged … as if some invisible god were unjustly favouring me … quite beyond my deserts.”
“I don’t think you’re as favoured as you fancy you are,” said Christie, with the ghost of a smile. But Wolf went on:
“Do you know, Chris, I think I’m especially favoured in my scepticism. I’m sceptical about the reality of everything; even about the reality of Nature. Sometimes I think that there are several ‘Natures’ … several ‘Universes,’ in fact … one inside the other … like Chinese boxes. …”
“I know what you mean,” said the young girl hurriedly; and her eyes, as she looked at him, grew luminous with that indescribable excitement of mental sympathy that can bring tears from something deeper than passion.
Wolf, as he received this intimation, said to himself: “I can think aloud with her. Perhaps one day I’ll tell her about my ‘mythology’!” And there came over him, like a warm enveloping under-tide in which great crimson seaweeds were swaying, an unutterable sense of happiness. “Oh, I hope Gerda is all right!” he thought. And then, with a concentrated effort of his will, as if he were addressing a host of servile genii: “I command that Gerda shall be all right!”
It occurred to him at that moment, with a humorous force, that his father wouldn’t have been a man to allow such scruples as these to impinge upon his mind at such a juncture.
“Had you any idea,” he said suddenly, “that Mattie wasn’t Albert Smith’s child?”
“I soon saw the likeness to you, anyway,” Christie replied evasively, “the first day Father brought you to see me.”
“I like Mattie so much,” he went on; “but her resemblance to me can’t be said to improve her looks. Has anyone ever made love to her, do you think?”
Christie laughed. “Well, you must be nice to her, anyway, Wolf dear, to make up in case they haven’t.”
“I should be afraid of Miss Gault’s sending her off to Australia!” he said with a chuckle, and then felt curiously relieved to find that the grossness of this rather clumsy jest did not shock his companion. “Nothing shocks her,” he said to himself; and his mind took a long flight to his years in London, where, except for his mother, there was no one to whom he could have talked as he had done this afternoon.
“Well, I must be off,” he said, rather wearily, when these thoughts had finished their circle and had sunk down in the manner of birds on a bough. “I’ve got an uncomfortable homecoming before me, what with one thing and another.”
“Don’t make too much of it,” she said, opening the door for him and holding both handles of it with her hands, so as to avoid any definite farewell. “Gerda will be so thankful to have got through it, that when your two mothers leave she’ll be radiant again.”
“I hope she won’t be too radiant before they leave,” retorted Wolf grimly. “I don’t want many repetitions of this particular tea-party.”
She kept the door open till he was halfway downstairs, and they nodded rather dolorously at each other across the banisters. He heard the door shut as he entered the shop below, and a pang passed through him.
As he walked rapidly home, he found himself engaged in an imaginary dialogue with his father.
The skeleton under those obstinate plantains kept grinning mockingly in reply to every argument. “Life is short,” said the skeleton, “and the love of girls is the only escape from its miseries.”
“It’s not so short as all that,” retorted the son, “and in every Paradise there is a snake!”