Yellow Bracken
Wolf took good care not to reveal to his mother his own secret reservations as to the desirability of Lenty Cottage. But that first impression of something uncannily neat and trim about it still obstinately persisted in his own mind after the stir of their arrival was over.
There was no word spoken about their keeping a servant; but Mrs. Martin, the Squire’s housekeeper, promised that their maid, Bessie, should come in two or three times a week to clean up. But how far his mother—who, as Wolf knew, disliked cooking—would be able to deal with their meals, remained to be seen.
On the morning of Wednesday, after their first two nights in their new abode, it struck Wolf that it would be amusing, before entering on his labours with Mr. Urquhart, to pay a visit to King’s Barton Vicarage.
He found the clergyman working in his garden, and followed him into his forlorn house, the whitewashed exterior of which was stained with faint yellows, greens, and browns by the varied moods of the weather. He followed him up an uncarpeted staircase and across an uncarpeted landing.
The rooms downstairs, the doors of which stood wide open, were evidently used as religious classrooms; for the only furniture they contained was a miserable collection of wooden forms and battered cane-bottom chairs. Of the rooms at the top of the staircase, the doors of which stood open too, one appeared to be the vicar’s bedroom—the bed was unmade and the floor was littered with tattered magazines—and another the priest’s sitting-room or study.
The whole house looked as though its owner had long since relinquished every kind of effort to get that personal happiness out of life which is the inheritance of the meanest. Its shabby desolation seemed to project, in opposition to every human instinct, a forlorn emptiness that was worse than squalor. Its effect upon Wolf’s senses was ghastly. No one could conceive a return to such a house as a return “home”! What it meant was simply that this wretched little priest had no home. The basic human necessity for some degree of cheerfulness in one’s lair was outraged and violated.
The room into which Wolf was now led had at least the redemption of a small fire of red coals. But except for this, it was not a place where a stranger would wish to prolong his stay. It was littered from end to end with cheap novels. Chairs, tables, and even the floor, were piled up with these vulgarly-bound volumes. The vaporous March light filtering in through dingy muslin curtains threw a watery pallor upon these abortions of human mediocrity.
“You seem to be fond of reading,” remarked Wolf to his host, as he sat down on the only chair that was not in use.
“Mostly stories,” responded T. E. Valley, turning his head round with a whimsical grimace, as he fumbled at the lock of a small cupboard hanging against the wall. “Mostly stories,” he repeated. Having cleared a chair and the fragment of a table, he sat down opposite his guest with a bottle of brandy between them and two glasses.
“You are not unhappy, then,” remarked Wolf, trying to overcome his discomfort. “Books and brandy … and a fire for chilly days. … You might be much worse off than you are, Vicar … much worse off.”
T. E. Valley smiled wanly. “Much worse off,” he repeated, refilling his glass. “But you know those stories are hardly literature, Solent—hardly theology, Solent. It is curious,” he went on, meditatively, resting his chin upon his clenched hands and supporting his elbows on the table. “It is curious that with Urquhart and Jason Otter always working against me, and with most of the parish despising me, I am not more often in despair. Especially as I have so poor a conceit of myself. I know myself through and through, Solent; and I am the weakest, feeblest character alive! And yet, as you say, I really am not, not at bottom, I mean, an unhappy person. It is curious. I can’t understand it.”
He was silent for a space; while Wolf found himself giving way to a strange, almost sensual spasm of nervous sympathy. There was something about the man’s abject humility that excited him in a way he could not have explained.
“It doesn’t matter what T. E. Valley does,” he began again, his voice rising to a shrill squeal, like the voice of a prophet among mice. “It doesn’t matter whether I drink or whether I stay sober! The blessed Sacrament remains the same, whatever happens to T. E. Valley!”
Wolf looked at him and exulted in the man’s exultation. “He’s got hold of it,” he thought, “whatever he likes to call it. He’s got hold of it. This awful house might be a prison, an asylum, a slave-galley. The fellow’s a saint! He’s got hold of it!”
But it was his practical reason rather than his nervous sympathy that dictated his next words. “You don’t worry yourself about conduct, then, or about duty?”
The little man’s disordered El Greco eyes grew bright within their hollow sockets. “Not a bit!” he cried. “Not a bit!”
“And morality?” enquired Wolf.
There was a pause at this; and the light in those animated eyes went out suddenly, just as if Wolf had put an extinguisher over them.
“You mean the matter of unholy love,” murmured T. E. Valley.
“If you call it so,” said Wolf.
“That is another question,” the man admitted, and he gave vent to a sigh of infinite sadness. “Why it should be so, it’s hard to tell; but every kind of love, even the most insane and depraved—even incest, for instance—is connected with religion and touches religion. When I get drunk it’s a matter of chemistry. When I get angry it’s a matter of nerves. But when I love in the wrong way—”
The priest of King’s Barton rose to his feet. With a shaky hand he deliberately poured back into the decanter his unfinished drink. Then, with awkward shuffling steps, steps that made Wolf aware for the first time that instead of boots he wore large, ragged, leather slippers, he came round the table to his guest’s side.
“I’m nothing,” he mumbled almost incoherently. “I’m nothing. But don’t you know,” he said, seizing Wolf’s hand in his dirty, feverish fingers, “don’t you know that love sinks down into the roots of the whole world? Don’t you know that there are … levels … in life … that … that … defy Nature?”
Wolf’s brain became suddenly clearer than it had been all day since he first got out of bed that morning. It seemed to him that between this confessed “morality” of Tilly-Valley and what he had already divined as the unconfessed “immorality” of Mr. Urquhart, there was a ghastly reciprocity. He suddenly felt a reaction in favour of the most simple earthborn heathenism. He deliberately finished his glass of brandy, and stood up.
“I don’t think any of us knows very much about love,” he mumbled. And then he went on rather lamely: “I think there are a great many different kinds of love, just as there are a great many different kinds of malice.” He stopped again, his mind struggling with the difficulty of expression. “I don’t think,” he blurted out, “that most of the kinds of love we run across sink down to the bottom of the universe!”
Having said this, he uttered a short, uncomfortable schoolboy-chuckle. “Well, well,” he added gently, “I’m not so certain about any of this as to be rude to anyone over it! Well, goodbye, Valley,” and he held out his hand. “By the by, my mother will expect a call from you soon. You will come, won’t you? Drop in at teatime. I’m generally in then; only don’t let it be tomorrow, because we’re going to the Show. Shall we see you there?” And he shook the priest’s hand with affectionate cordiality, searching his mind with his eyes. …
It was just lunchtime when he returned to Lenty Cottage. His mother had been weeding in the garden all the morning; and she brought into the small front-room, where they had their light meal, a breath of earth-mould that was very acceptable after his recent conversation.
“You look very well pleased with yourself, Wolf,” she said, as they sat down opposite each other. “What have you been doing to make you feel so complacent?”
“Acting as oil and wine, Mother,” he answered, “between the squire and the vicar.”
She threw back her head and laughed wickedly.
“You’re a nice one to settle quarrels! But I suppose you settled this one by shouting them both down, and that’s what’s given your dear face—as grandmamma used to say—that ‘beyond yourself’ look! There’s a letter for you under that book; but you shan’t have it till I’ve finished this good meal and drunk my coffee.”
Wolf looked at the book in question, which was a large edition of Young’s Night Thoughts bound like a school-prize.
“It’s a child’s hand,” said his mother, watching his face with gleaming brown eyes. “Is it from that little Smith girl, do you think? Or have those people you stayed with, those funny Otter people, got any children?”
Wolf shook his head. Could it be from Olwen Smith? It appeared unlikely; but the child did seem to have taken a fancy to him. It was possible. But then, in one of those sudden clairvoyances that emanate so strangely from unopened letters, he felt certain that it wasn’t from a child at all. It was from Gerda!
“You’re mad to read it, Wolf, I can see that. But I won’t have my good lunch spoilt. I think it would be nice if we had our coffee at once, don’t you? Do go and bring it in! It’s on the kitchen-stove.”
He obeyed with alacrity, as he always did in these caprices of his mother’s, and they sipped their coffee in suspended excitement, their eyes shining across the table like the eyes of two animals.
“Oh, it’ll be so amusing, going to the Horse Show,” she cried. “I wonder how many of them I shall recognize? Albert used to be ever so embarrassed when I made a fuss over him in public. And I did, you know, I often did; just to show I didn’t care a fig about Lorna’s silliness!”
Obscurely irritated by the flippancy of this allusion to his father’s misconduct, and definitely impatient at the enforced delay about the letter, Wolf suddenly burst out: “I’ve been to tea with Selena Gault, Mother. She wrote and invited me.” He did not say that he had been the first to take the initiative in this affair. He felt it to be revenge enough without that. But Mrs. Solent was a match for him.
“Oh, I’m so glad, Wolf, that you went to cheer up that old monster. That was sweet of you! Think of it! My son sitting down to tea with all the Ramsgard old ladies! I’m sure she invited every one of the masters’ wives and mothers to meet you. ‘The son of my old friend, William Solent.’ I can hear her say it! Well—do tell me, Wolf! For this is really getting interesting. What did you think of the great Gault? Of course, you know how it is with me. I never can endure deformity! I feel sorry and so forth; but I just can’t see it about. It was over the Gault that your father and I had our final quarrel. No, you must listen to me! He was as insensitive about things like that as in everything else. He had absolutely no fastidiousness. The Gault had never before met any man who could even look at her. I mean—you know!—look at her as men do look at us. And it just went to her poor, dear head. She fell madly in love—if you can call it love, in a monster like that—and the extraordinary thing about it was that it didn’t horrify your father. I don’t want to be catty; but really—you know!—with a deformity like that—You’d have thought he’d have run to the end of the world. But not at all! What are you doing, Wolf? Take your hands from your head!”
But Wolf, with his long, bony middle fingers pressed against his ears, contented himself with making a shameless grimace at the woman who had given him birth.
Quick as lightning Mrs. Solent ran to the side-table, and snatching up the letter that was beneath the book, made as though she would throw it in the fire.
This manoeuvre was entirely successful. Her son rushed upon her; and the half-playful, half-serious struggle that ensued between them ended in his wresting the letter out of her clenched fingers.
He then pushed her down by main force into an armchair and hurriedly handed her a cigarette and a lighted match.
“Now please be good, Mother darling!” he pleaded. “I’ll tell you everything when I’ve read it.”
He sat down in the opposite chair and tore open the letter. His mother puffed great rings of smoke into the air between them and surveyed him with glittering eyes—with eyes that had in their brown depths an almost maudlin passion of affection.
Miss Selena Gault was forgotten.
The letter was written in pencil and in a handwriting as straggling and unformed as that of a little girl of ten. “Olwen would have composed a much more grown-up production,” he thought, as he read the following words:
My dear Mr. Solent:
I am going out water-rat hunting with a basket for marigolds and to see if there are any moorhens down there. I’m going to start directly after dinner with Lob and go down stream just like we did before. Miss Malakite wants us to have tea with her about five. So do come there if you can’t come to the Lunt.
This is from your little friend, Gerda.
“It is from a child,” he said as casually as he could, stepping up to his mother’s side and waving the letter in front of her. He felt a tremendous reluctance to let her read it; and yet, being the woman she was, he dared not put it straight into his pocket. Nothing of this was hidden from Mrs. Solent; but she had had her little victory in the matter of Miss Gault, and she was in a mood to be indulgent now.
“All right, Wolf, put it into your pocket. I don’t want to see it. I expect you’ll find much nicer barmaids in Blacksod than you ever did in Hammersmith. I won’t interfere with your light-o’-loves. I never have, have I?”
“No, you never have, Mother darling,” he responded, with a rush of affection born of immense relief. And slipping Gerda’s note into his coat-pocket, he leaned forward and took her handsome, ruddy face between the palms of his hands.
“But I’m off, now, my treasure; and don’t expect me back till late tonight!” He hesitated for a moment, and then added: “You’d better not stay awake; though I know you will; but I shall be coming home with the Otters, and I’ll let myself in quietly.”
He kissed her quickly and placed both his hands for a moment upon the rough mass of her grey hair. She smiled back at him gaily enough, but he wondered if that little sound he seemed conscious of in the cavity of her strong throat was an evidence of some other emotion. If it was, she swallowed it as completely and effectively as if it had been a little silver minnow swallowed by a watchful pike.
“I shall just go to bed, then, and read in bed,” she cried jestingly, when he let her go. “I’m in the middle of a thrilling story about a young man who has every vice there is! I’m sure he’s got some vices that even Selena Gault’s never heard of. I’ll go on with that; and if I want a little variety, I’ll read the book Cousin Carfax gave me about Chinese Rugs; and if that doesn’t satisfy me, I’ll read Casanova’s Memoirs. No, I won’t! I’ll read Canon Pusey’s Sermons or something of that sort … something that just rambles on and isn’t modern or clever! So run off, and don’t worry about me. By the way, I had my first caller this morning, when you were over at the Manor.”
“Who was that, Mother?” enquired Wolf, flicking his stick against his boot and thinking of the tombstone in Mr. Torp’s yard.
“Mrs. Otter!” she cried gaily. “And I believe we’ll get on splendidly. She told me how fond you and her son Jason were of each other.”
“Jason?” muttered Wolf. “Well, take care of yourself, darling! Don’t work too hard in the garden. Remember tomorrow!” And he opened the door hastily and let himself out. “Jason?” he muttered once more, as he strode down Lenty Lane.
His walk to Blacksod that early afternoon was one long orgy of amorous evocations. He skirted the town in such an absorbed trance that he found himself in the river-meadow before he realized that he’d left the streets behind. Nothing could have been more congruous with his mood that afternoon than this slow following of the waters of the Lunt! Past poplars and willows, past muddy ditches and wooden dams, past deserted cowsheds and old decrepit barges half-drowned in water, past tall hedges of white-flowering blackthorn, past low thick hedges of scarcely budded hawthorn, past stupid large-bodied cattle with shiny red hides and enormous horns, past tender, melancholy cattle with liquid eyes and silky brown-and-white flanks, he made his way through those pleasant pastures.
So beautiful was the relaxed Spring atmosphere, that by degrees the excitement of his sensuality ebbed a little; and the magic of Nature became of equal importance with the thrill of amorous pursuit.
Though the sky was overcast, it was overcast with such a heavenly “congregation of vapours” that Wolf would not have had it otherwise. There were filmy clouds floating there that seemed to be drifting like the scattered feathers of enormous albatrosses in a pearl-white sea; and behind these feathery travellers was the milky ocean on which they floated. But even that was not all; for the very ocean seemed broken here and there into hollow spaces, ethereal gulfs in the fleecy whiteness; and through these gulfs was visible a pale yellowish mist, as if the universal air were reflecting millions of primrose-buds! Nor was even this vaporous luminosity the final revelation of those veiled heavens. Like the entrance to some great highway of the ether, whose air-spun pavement was not the colour of dust, but the colour of turquoise, there, at one single point above the horizon, the vast blue sky showed through. Transcending both the filmy whiteness and the vaporous yellowness, hovering there above the marshes of Sedgemoor, this celestial Toll-Pike of the Infinite seemed to Wolf, as he walked towards it, like some entrance into an unknown dimension, into which it was not impossible to pass! Though in reality it was the background of all the clouds that surrounded it, it seemed in some mysterious way nearer than they were. It seemed like a harbour into which the very waters of the Lunt might flow. That incredible patch of blue seemed something into which he could plunge his hands and draw them forth again, filled like overflowing cups with the very ichor of happiness. Ah! That was the word. It was pure happiness, that blue patch! It was the very thing he had tried so clumsily to explain to that poor Tilly-Valley, that both he and Mr. Urquhart so woefully lacked! And this was the thing, he thought, as he walked slowly on through the green, damp grass, after which his whole life was one obstinate quest. Ay! Where did it grow, this happiness? Where did it bubble up free and unspoiled? Not, at any rate, in such “love”—half sex, half reaction from sex—that these two disordered people were pursuing!
Not in asceticism, nor in vice! Where then? He began to stride forward with all his mind and all his soul fixed on that blue patch over Sedgemoor. Not in any human struggle of that kind! Rather in some large, free, unrestricted recognition of something actually in Nature, something that came and went, something that the mind could evoke, something that required nothing save earth and sky for its fulfilment!
Between himself and that blue patch there stretched now the great trunk of a bending willow, covered, as if by a liquid green mist, with its countless newly-budded twigs. The trunk seemed attracted down to the waters of the Lunt; and the waters of the Lunt seemed to rise a little, as they flowed on, in reciprocal attraction. And through the green buds of this bending trunk the patch of blue looked closer than ever. It was not any opening highway, not any ethereal road, as he had imagined at first. It was actually a pool of unfathomable blue water; a pool in space! As he looked at it now, those green willow-buds became living moss around its blue edge; and a great yellowish fragment of sky that leaned towards it became a tawny-skinned centaur, who, bending down his human head from his animal body, quenched his thirst in its purity. A yellow man-beast drinking draughts of blue water!
Wolf stopped dead-still and gazed at what he saw, as ever more nearly and more nearly what he saw became what he imagined. This was what he wanted! This was what he sought! The brown earth was that tawny-skinned centaur; and the reason why the world was all so green about him was because all living souls—the souls of grass-blades and tree-roots and river-reeds—shared, after their kind, in the drinking up of that blue immensity by the great mouth of clay!
He moved on now again and slowly passed the bent tree. His thoughts relaxed and grew limp after his moment of ecstasy; but such as they were, like languid-winged herons, they flapped heavily over the dykes and ditches of his life.
He felt obstinately glad that through all those detestable London years—the weight of which, like chains that are thrown away, he had never realized till they were over—he had just ploughed through his work at that college, his head bent, his shoulders hunched, his spirit concentrated, stoical, unyielding! What had it been in him that had kept him, for twelve heavy years, stubbornly at work on all that unbelievable drudgery? What had it been in him that had saved him from love-affairs, from marriage—that had made it horrible for him to satisfy his sexual instincts with casual light-o’-loves from taprooms and music-halls? What had it been? He looked at a great alder-root that curved snakelike over the brown mud beneath the bank; and in the tenacious flexibility of that smooth phallic serpent of vegetation he seemed to detect an image of his own secretive life, craftily forcing its way forward, through a thousand obstacles, towards the liberation which it craved.
And what was this liberation?
Happiness! But not any kind of happiness; not just the happiness of making love to Gerda Torp.
He looked closely at the manner in which the alder-root dipped so adroitly and yet so naturally into the river. Yes! It was a kind of ecstasy he aimed at; the kind that loses itself, that merges itself; the kind that demands nothing in return!
How could this ecstasy be called love? It was more than love. It was the coming to the surface of something unutterable.
And then, like an automatic wheel that revolved in his brain, a wheel from one of whose spokes hung a bodiless human head, his thoughts brought him back to that Living Despair on the Waterloo steps. And he recalled what Jason Otter had said about pity: how if you had pity and there was one miserable consciousness left in the universe, you had no right to be happy. Oh, that was a wicked thought! You had, on the contrary, a desperately punctilious reason to be happy.
That face upon the Waterloo steps gave you your happiness. It was the only gift it could give. Between your happiness and that face there was an umbilical cord. All suffering was a martyr’s suffering, all happiness was a martyr’s happiness, when once you got a glimpse of that cord! It was the existence in the world of those two gross vulgar parodies of life, ennui and pleasure, that confused the issues, that blighted the distinctions.
For about half a mile he walked steadily forward, letting the violence of this last thought be smoothed away by the feel of the damp soil under his feet, and the cool touch, imperceptible in detail, through his leather boots—of all the anonymous weeds and grasses that were beginning to feel the release of Spring.
Ah, there they were!
He came upon them quite suddenly, as he clambered over a wooden paling between the end of a thickset hedge and the riverbank, the wooden boards of which, worm-eaten and grey with lichen, jutted out over the water.
They were seated side by side on a fallen elm-tree, arranging the contents of a great wicker-basket that lay on the ground between them.
“Hullo!” cried Lob, jumping to his feet.
Wolf took the boy in his arms and began a sort of genial horseplay with him, tumbling him over in the grass and holding him down by force as he kicked and struggled. But Lob soon wearied of this, and, lying quietly under the man’s hands, turned his mud-flicked, grass-stained face towards his sister.
“You see I be right, Sis! So hand over thik ninepence. He be come, same as I said ’a would. So hand over what I’ve won!”
Wolf became aware that a fit of sudden shyness had fallen upon both himself and Gerda. He continued to kneel above the prostrate Lob, pinioning the child’s arms and putting off the moment when he must rise and face her. Gerda, too, seemed to prolong with unnecessary punctiliousness her fumbling with the ragged recesses of her faded little purse, as she emptied pennies and bits of silver into her lap.
“Ninepence! It was ninepence!” the boy kept shouting, as he sought in vain to lift up his eager grass-stained face high enough to see what the girl was doing: “It was sixpence if he went to Malakite’s! It was ninepence if he came here!”
Wolf, bending over his prisoner, found himself watching the progress of a minute ladybird who with infinite precaution was climbing the bent stalk of a small grass-blade close to the boy’s head. But he was so conscious of Gerda’s presence that a slow, sweet, shivering sensation ran through his nerves, as if in the midst of a great heat his body had been plunged into the cool air of a cavern.
“There, Lob!” said Gerda suddenly, holding out sixpence and three pennies.
Wolf let the child go and stood up.
Their eyes met through the boy’s violent scramble and snatching clutch. They met through his cry of “Finding’s keepings, losing’s seekings! Bet me enough to make a shilling! I be a prime grand better, I be!”
And, as their eyes met, the shyness that they had felt before changed into a thrilling solemnity. For one quick moment they held each other’s gaze; and it was as if they had been overtaken simultaneously by an awestruck recognition of some great unknown Immortal, who had suddenly appeared between them, with a hand upon each.
Then the girl turned to her brother.
“I bet you, Lob,” she said, “you won’t find a blackbird’s nest round here with eggs in it!”
“How much?” the boy responded, standing in front of her with his hands behind his head, in the pose of a young, indolent conqueror.
“How much!—how much!” mocked Wolf, with heavy humour, seating himself on the tree-trunk by Gerda’s side. “What a young miser we are!” As he took his place by her side, the floating barge upon which it seemed to him they were embarked rocked with a motion that gave him a sense of sweet dizziness.
Lob looked at his sister gravely, weighing the matter in his mind.
“You won’t hunt rats with him when I’m not there?” he bargained.
She shook her head.
“ ’Tis early for them nesties; but I do know for three o’n already; up along Babylon Hill. They be all hipsy-hor hedges, looks-like, in this here field; and blackbirds be fonder o’ holly-trees and bramble-bushes. But they bain’t so sly, the bloody old yellow-beaks, as them thrushes be. I think I’ll do it, Sis.”
“I think I may take her bond,” muttered Wolf under his breath.
“I haven’t heard one of them since we came,” said Gerda cunningly. “They like the hills better than down here on the flat. I wouldn’t have betted so much if I wasn’t sure I’d win.”
“I ain’t betted nothink,” said Lob quickly, “so you can’t win anyways. It’s either us both loses, or it’s me what wins.”
Gerda nodded assent to this unchivalrous issue.
“Well, I may as well have a look round,” decided the boy; “only mind—no tricks! If you rat-hunt with him when I ain’t there, ’twill be threepence whatsoever.”
She indicated assent to this also.
Lob began to swagger slowly away.
“I knows why you wants me to shog off,” he called back; and he added an outrageous expression in shrewd Dorset dialect which had the effect of bringing an angry flush to Gerda’s cheeks.
“Be off, you rogue,” cried Wolf, “or you’ll get more than you’ve bargained for!”
But there came flying through the air, from the child’s impudent hand, a well-aimed puffball, which burst as it touched Gerda’s knee, covering her dress with a thin, powdery brown dust.
Neither she nor Wolf moved a muscle in response to this attack; and Lobbie wandered slowly off till he was lost to sight. Then the girl got up and began shaking her skirt. The cream-coloured cloak hung loose and open, and Wolf saw that she was dressed in an old, tight-fitting, olive-green frock.
When she had finished brushing the puffball-powder from her clothes, she took off her hat and laid it carefully, absentmindedly, upon the tree-trunk by his side.
He instantaneously threw his arms round her and held her lightly against him, while in the silence between them he felt his heart beating like an invisible underground water-pump.
But she unloosed his hands with deft, cool fingers. “Not now,” she said. “Let’s talk now.”
In some mysterious way he was grateful to her for this. The last thing he wanted was to spoil the strange, lovely solemnity that had fallen upon them like the falling of slow, thin, noiseless rain.
He rose and took her hand, and they began moving away from the log.
“Wait! I’ll leave a signal for that little rascal,” he said, putting his stick and his cloth-cap by the side of the cream-coloured hat. But he did not give up her hand; and together they walked carelessly and aimlessly across that wide field, taking a course at right angles to the course taken by her brother. Wolf had hitherto, in his attitude to the girls he had approached, been dominated by an impersonal lust; but what he now felt stealing over him like a sweet, insidious essence, was the actual, inmost identity of this young human animal. And the strange thing was that this conscious presence, this deep-breathing Gerda, moving silently beside him under her cloak, under her olive-green frock, under everything she wore, was not just a girl, not just a white, flexible body, with lovely breasts, slender hips, and a gallant swinging stride, but a living conscious soul, different in its entire being from his own identity.
What he felt at that moment was that, hovering in some way around this tangible form, was another form, impalpable and delicate, thrilling him with a kind of mystical awe. It changed everything around him, this new mysterious being at his side, whose physical loveliness was only its outward sheath! It added something to every tiniest detail of that enchanted walk which they took together now over one green field after another. The little earth-thrown molehills were different. The reddish leaves of the newly-sprung sorrel were different. The droppings of the cattle, the clumps of dark-green meadow-rushes, all were different! And something in the cold, low-hung clouds themselves seemed to conspire, like a great stretched-out grey wing, to separate Gerda and himself from the peering intrusion of the outer world.
And if the greyness above and the greenness beneath enhanced his consciousness of the virginal beauty of the girl, her own nature at that hour seemed to gather into itself all that most resembled it in that Spring twilight.
Gate after gate leading from one darkening field into another they opened and passed through, walking unconsciously westward, towards the vast yellowish bank of clouds that had swallowed up that sky-road into space. It was so far only the beginning of twilight, but the undried rains that hung still in motionless water-drops upon millions of grass-blades seemed to welcome the coming on of night—seemed to render the whole surface of the earth less opaque.
Over this cold surface they moved hand in hand, between the unfallen mist of rain in the sky and the diffused mist of rain in the grass, until the man began to feel that they two were left alone alive, of all the people of the earth—that they two, careless of past and future, protected from the very ghosts of the dead by these tutelary vapours, were moving forward, themselves like ghosts, to some vague imponderable sanctuary where none could disturb or trouble them!
They had advanced for more than a mile in this enchanted mood, and were leaning against a wooden gate which they had just shut behind them, when Wolf pointed to an open shed, about a stone’s throw away, the floor of which he could make out, from where they stood, to be strewn with a carpet of yellow bracken.
“Shall we try that as a shelter?” he asked. The words were simple enough. But Gerda detected in them the old, equivocal challenge of the male pursuer; and as he pulled at her wrist, trying to lead her towards the shed, she stiffened her body, snatched her hand away, and drew back against the protective bars of the gate. Very quickly then, so as to smooth away any hurt to his pride, she began to speak; and since silence rather than words had hitherto been the link between them, the mere utterance of any speech from her at all was a shock strong enough to quell his impetuousness.
“Did you like me directly you saw me, that day in our house?”
He looked at her attentively, as, with her fair head bare and her arms spread out along the top bar of the gate, she asked this naive question.
It suddenly came over him that she had not really the remotest conception as to how rare her beauty was. She regarded herself, of course, as a “pretty” girl, but she had no notion that she moved through Blacksod like one of those women of antiquity about whose loveliness the noblest legends of the world were made! A certain vein of predatory roguery in him led him to play up to this simplicity.
“I liked you best when you were whistling to me,” he said. But in his senses he thought: “I should be a madman not to snatch at her!” And in his soul he thought: “I shall marry her. As sure as tomorrow follows today, I shall marry her!”
“I liked you best when you were hunting for me at Poll’s Camp,” said Gerda. “But I can’t understand—”
“What can’t you understand, Gerda?”
“I can’t understand why I don’t want you to touch me just now. But oh! if you only knew what things they say in the town about girls and men!”
She looked him straight in the face with an ambiguous tilt of her soft, rounded chin. Something had come between them—something that troubled him seriously, though not with the sense of any unscalable barrier.
“What things do they say in the town?” he asked.
At this she clapped her hands to her cheeks, and a look of troubled bewilderment crossed her fixed gaze.
He began to wonder if the girl, for all her coquetries, was not abnormally innocent. Perhaps the extreme lewdness of lads like Bob Weevil had, in some of those furtive conclaves between young people that are always so complete a mystery to older persons, given her some kind of startled shock.
Slowly her hands fell to her sides, and the troubled look faded; but she still faced him with a faint, tremulous frown, while the delicate curves about her eyes took on that expression of monumental beseeching, such as one sees sometimes in antique marbles.
His craving to take her in his arms was checked by a wave of overpowering tenderness.
As she stood there, with her back to the gate, her personality struck home to him with such a sharp, sudden pang of reality, that it made certain tiny little blossoms of the blackthorn-hedge become strangely important, as if they had been an apparition of wonderful white swans.
“Well, never mind what they say in the town! You and I are by ourselves now. It’s only you and I that count today. And I won’t tease you, Gerda, you darling—no, not with one least thing you don’t like!”
He was silent, and they remained motionless, staring at each other like two stone pillars bearing the solemn weight of the unknown future. Then he possessed himself of one of her hands, and it was a new shock to him to feel how ice-cold her fingers had grown.
“Don’t act as if we’re strangers, Gerda!” he pleaded. “I do understand you—much more than you think I do. And I’ll take care of you forever! It isn’t as if time mattered one bit. I feel as if I’d known you all my life. I feel as if everything here”—and he glanced round at those strangely important white blossoms—“were an old story already. It’s funny, Gerda, isn’t it, how natural and yet how weird it is, that we should have met at all? Only a week ago I was in London, with no remotest idea that you were in the world—or this gate, or this blackthorn-hedge, or that shed over there!”
Her cold fingers did respond a little to his pressure now, and her eyes fell and searched the ground at her feet. Without a sigh, without a breath, she pondered, floating upon some inner sea of feeling, of which no one, not even herself, would ever know the depths.
“You are glad we’ve met, Gerda, dear?” he asked.
She raised her eyes. They had the tension of a sudden, difficult resolution in them.
“Do men ever leave girls alone after they’ve married them?”
The words were so unexpected that he could only press her cold fingers and glance away from those troubled eyes. What his own gaze encountered was a single tarnished celandine, whose bent stalk lay almost flat on a wisp of rain-sodden grass.
“When we’re married,” he responded gravely, after a pause, during which he felt as if with his own hands he were launching a rigged ship into a misty sea, “I’ll leave you alone just as much as you want!”
“A girl I know said once that my whistling was only whistling for a lover. You don’t think that, do you?”
“Good God! I should think not! Your whistling’s a wonderful thing. It’s your genius. It’s your way of expressing what we all want to express.”
“What do we all want to express?”
He chuckled right out at this, and, forgetting all vows and pledges, flung his arms round her shoulders and hugged her tightly to his heart. “Oh, Gerda, Gerda!” he cried breathlessly, as he let her go, “you’ll be soon making me so damnably fond of you, that I’ll be completely at your mercy!”
“But what do we all want to express?” she repeated.
He felt such a rush of happiness at the change in her voice that he could only answer at random.
“God! my dear, I don’t know! Recognition, I suppose. No! not exactly that! Gratitude, perhaps. But that’s not quite it. You’ve asked a hard question, sweetheart, and I’m damned if I can give you the answer.” He drew her towards him as he spoke, and this time she seemed to yield herself as she had never done before. But the warmth of her body, as he pressed it to him, dissolved his tender consideration so quickly that once more she drew back.
Hurriedly anxious to rush in between her thoughts and herself, he began saying the first thing that came into his head.
“I think what we all want to express is … something … addressed … to … to the gods … some kind of … acknowledgement—”
He stopped abruptly; for she had once more fixed upon him that wild, bewildered look.
“You’re not angry with me, Gerda, darling?” he blurted out.
She did not take any notice of these words of his, but the look he dreaded began to fade away under the genuine concern of his tone.
She now pulled her cream-coloured cloak tightly across her olive-green frock; and instead of relinquishing the garment when she’d done this, she kept her arms crossed against her breast, holding the gathered folds of the woollen stuff. Then her lips moved, and, looking away from him, sideways, over the wide field, she said very quietly:
“If you feel it’s no good, and you couldn’t think of marrying a girl like me, you’d better let me go home now.”
He never forgot the solemn fatality she put into those words; and he answered in the only way he could. He took her head gently between his hands and kissed her upon the forehead. This action, in its grave tenderness and its freedom from any fever of the blood, did seem to reassure her.
But the attraction of her sweetness soon excited his senses again and he began caressing her in spite of himself. She did not resist him any more; but the reaction from the former tenseness of her nerves broke down her self-control, and he soon became aware of the salt taste of tears upon his lips. She did not cry aloud. She cried silently; but the sobs that shook her showed, in the very power they had over her, the richness and vitality of her youthful blood.
The fact that he had launched his boat and hoisted his sail—the fact that he had already resolved to marry her, come what might—was something that in itself dispelled his scruples.
“It’s cold here,” he murmured, when at last she had lifted up her tear-stained face and they had exchanged some long kisses; “it’s cold here, Gerda, darling. Lets just see what that shed over there’s like! We needn’t stay a minute there if it’s not a nice sort of place.”
A species of deep, lethargic numbness to everything except the immediate suggestions of his voice and touch seemed to have taken possession of her.
His arm round her, her cream-coloured cloak hanging loose, her cheeks pale, she let herself be led across the intervening tract of grass to the open door of the little shed.
Before they reached it, however, she turned her face round and glanced shyly at him. “You know I’m quite stupid and ignorant,” she said. “I know nothing about anything.”
Wolf did not pause to enquire whether this hurried confession referred to what might be named “the ritual of love” or just simply to her lack of book-learning. His senses were by this time in such a whirl of excitement that the girl’s clear-toned voice sounded like the vague humming of a seashell in his ears.
“Gerda?” he murmured huskily, with a faint, a very faint interrogation in his tone.
Emotions, feelings, desires, some exalted, some brutal, whirled up from the bottom of his nature, like stormdriven eels roused and stirred from the ooze of a muddy river!
Together they stood at the entrance to that little shed and surveyed the interior in a silence that was like the hovering of some great falcon of fate, suspended between past and future. The place was an empty cow-barn, its roof thatched with river-reeds and its floor thickly strewn with a clean, dry bed of last Autumn’s yellow bracken.
The queer thing was that as he drew her across that threshold his conscious soul seemed to slip out of his body and to watch them both from the high upper air as if it were itself that falcon of fate. But when, with their feet upon that bracken-floor, they faced each other, there suddenly floated into Wolf’s mind, like the fluttering of a whirling leaf upon disturbed water, an old Dorset ditty that he had read somewhere, with a refrain about Shaftesbury-town.
“I know nothing about anything,” repeated the girl in a low voice; but as he held her tightly against his beating heart, it was not her words but the words of that old song which hummed through his brain.
There’ll be yellow bracken beneath your head;
There’ll be yellow bracken about your feet.
For the lass Long Thomas lays in’s bed
Will have no blanket, will have no sheet.
My mother has sheets of linen white,
My father has blankets of purple dye.
But to my truelove have I come tonight
And in yellow bracken I’ll surely lie:
In the yellow bracken he laid her down,
While the wind blew shrill and the river ran;
And never again she saw Shaftesbury-town,
Whom Long Thomas had taken for his leman!
The smell of the bracken rose up from that bed and took the words of this old song and turned them into the wild beating of the very pulse of love.
To the end of his days he associated that moment with these dried-up aromatic leaves and with that remembered rhyme. The sweetness of his paramour, her courage, her confiding trust, her “fatal passivity,” were blended with the fragrance of those withered ferns and with that old ballad.
Meanwhile the chilly March airs floated in and out of the bare shed where they were lying; and the shades of twilight grew deeper and deeper. Those twilight shades, as they settled down about their heads, became like veritable sentinels of love—wraithlike, reverential, patient. They seemed to be holding back the day, so that it should not peer into their faces. They seemed to be holding back the darkness, so that it should not separate them, the one from the other!
And as they lay—happy and oblivious at last—just as if they were really lying on the deck of some full-sailed ship which a great dark-green wave was uplifting, Wolf found himself unaccountably recalling certain casual little things that he had seen that day—seen without knowing that he had seen them! He recalled the underside of the bark of a torn-off willow-branch that he had caught sight of in his walk by the Lunt. He recalled the peculiar whitish-yellowness hidden in the curves of an opening fern-frond which he had passed somewhere on the road from King’s Barton. He recalled the sturdy beauty, full of a rich, harsh, acrid power, of a single chestnut-bud, which he had unconsciously noted in the outskirts of Blacksod. He recalled certain tiny snail-shells clinging to the stalk of some new-grown dock-leaf whose appearance had struck his mind somewhere in those meadows. …
When, after the slow ebbing of what really was a very brief passage of time, but what seemed to Wolf something more than time and different from time, they stood together again outside the hut, there came over him a vague feeling, as if he had actually invaded and possessed something of the virginal aloofness of the now darkened fields.
With his hand over Gerda’s shoulder he drank up a great mystery from those cool, wide spaces. His fingers clutched the soft collar of the girl’s cloak. He was conscious of her breathing—so steady, so gently, and yet so living—like the breath of a warm, soft animal in the velvet darkness. He was conscious of her personality as something quivering and quick, and yet as something solitary, unapproachable.
Suddenly she broke the silence.
“Do you want me to whistle for you?” she asked, in a low, docile voice.
The words reached his ears from an enormous distance. They came travelling to him over rivers, over mountains, over forests; and as they took shape in his consciousness, something quite different from what he had felt for her swelled up in his throat. He took her head between his hands and kissed her as he had never in his life kissed any woman.
“Lob will hear it,” he said with a rough, happy laugh. “But let him hear it! What does it matter now?”
But she moved a few paces away and he watched her whitish shadowily-blurred face as if it had been the face of an immortal.
And he knew, without seeing that it was so, that her expression as she whistled was like the expression of a child asleep, or of a child happily, peacefully dead.
And, though it was into the night that she now poured those liquid notes, the tone of their drawn-out music was a tone full of the peculiar feeling of one hour alone of all the hours of night and day. It was the tone of the hour just before dawn, the tone of that life which is not sound, but only withheld breath, the breath of cold buds not yet green, of earthbound bulbs not yet loosed from their sheaths, the tone of the flight of swallows across chilly seas as yet far off from the warm pebbled beaches towards which they are steering their way.
Gerda’s whistling died away now into a silence that seemed to come surging back with a palpable increase of visible darkness in its train.
But the girl remained standing just where she was, quite motionless, about ten paces away from him.
He also remained motionless, where he was, without sign or word.
And just as two straight poplar-trees that in some continuous storm had been bent down so that their branches have mingled, when the storm is over rise up erect and are once more completely separate and completely themselves, so this man and this girl, whose relation to each other could never be quite the same again, remained distinct, removed, aloof, each standing like a silent bivouac-watcher, guarding the smouldering campfire of their own hidden thoughts.
Thus, and not otherwise, had stood, in the green dews of some umbrageous Thessalian valley at the very dawn of time, Orion and Merope, joined and yet so mysteriously divided by this sweet fatality! So in the same green dews had stood Deucalion and Pyrrha, while the earth waited for its new offspring. They also, those primeval lovers, had pondered thus, content and happy, bewildered and sad, while over their heads the darkness descended upon Mount Pelion, or the white moonlight flooded with silver the precipices of Ossa!
As he thought of these things, he made up his mind that he would refrain from any sentimental attempt to bridge the impassable gulf between what Gerda was feeling then and what he was feeling. … No casual words of easy tenderness should spoil the classical simplicity of their rare encounter! For classical it had been, in its arbitrariness, in its abruptness, in its heroic defiance of so many obstacles; as he had always prayed that any great love-affair of his might be.
Their words to each other, when at length they did break the spell and wander back hand in hand to where they had separated from Lob, were simple and natural—reduced, in fact, to the plain level of prosaic, practical anxieties.
“It’s the devil!” grumbled Wolf; “but there it is, sweetheart, and we’ve got to face it. It’s not only my mother, but your mother we shall have to deal with. I know only too well that I’ve never been to Oxford. I know I have no ‘honourable’ in front of my name and I know that what Mr. Urquhart gives me will be barely enough for three people to live upon. There it is, my sweet, and we’ve got to face it.”
“I don’t think your mother will want to live with us,” said the girl quietly.
Wolf winced at this. Somehow or other he had grown so used to thinking of his mother and himself as one person, that it gave him a very queer feeling—as if Gerda had inserted a tiny needle of ice into his heart—to think of the two of them under separate roofs.
A moment later, however, and the feeling passed, crushed under the logic of his reason. It was, of course, inevitable—so he said to himself—that Gerda, young girl though she was, should want a hearth of her own.
“No,” he answered, emphatically enough. “We must live by ourselves.”
“Father won’t give us anything,” said Gerda.
“That’s all right,” he chuckled, laughing surlily but not maliciously. “I’ve no desire to be supported out of tomb-making! No, no, sweetheart; what we’ve got to find is some tiny shanty of our own, almost as small as our cowshed, where neither your mother nor my mother can interfere with us.”
“Do you think Mrs. Solent will be very angry?” she enquired.
This time her words produced a more serious shock. He felt as if one of his arms or legs had been amputated and was stuck up as a ninepin for Gerda to throw things at, not knowing what she did.
“I’ll deal with her, anyway,” he replied.
“We’ll have to have our banns read out in church,” said Gerda.
“We shall!” he conceded, bringing out the syllables like pistol-shots; “but all that part of it will be awful.”
Gerda snatched her fingers from him and clapped her hands together. “Don’t let’s be married!” she cried gaily. “It’ll be far more fun not to be; and if I have a child it’ll be a bastard, like the kings in history!”
But Wolf had already formed a very definite image in his mind of the enchanted hovel where he would live with this unparalleled being, free from all care.
“We can’t manage it without being married, Gerda; and as for bastards—”
“Hush!” she cried. “We’re talking nonsense. Gipoo Cooper told me I should never have a child.”
Wolf was silenced by this; and then, after a pause, “I don’t believe Urquhart would make any fuss,” he said meditatively. “It wouldn’t interfere with my work.”
“What you don’t realize,” she protested in a low voice, “is how completely different my family is from yours. Why, Father never says a word like he’d been educated or been to School.”
But Wolf refused to let this pass.
“Perhaps you don’t realize, Missy,” he flung out, in a clear, emphatic voice, “that my father died in Ramsgard Workhouse!”
Her commentary upon this information was to snatch his hand and raise it to her lips.
“Tisn’t where a gentleman dies,” she responded, “that makes the difference. ’Tis where he’s born.”
“Oh, damn all this!” he cried abruptly. “I don’t care if your father talks his head off with Dorset talk; and all Blacksod knows that my father threw himself to the dogs. I’m going to live for the rest of my life in Dorsetshire, and I’m going to live alone with my sweet Gerda!”
He hugged her to his heart as he spoke.
“I’m very thankful that you like my whistling,” she said, rather breathlessly, when he let her go. “I don’t know what I should have done if you hadn’t.”
“Like it!” he cried. “Oh, Gerda, my Gerda, I can’t tell you what it’s like. I’ve never heard anything to touch it and never shall; and that’s the long and short of it!”
Thus discoursing, the lovers arrived at the prostrate elm-trunk where they had left their belongings. It looked so familiar and yet so different now, as they stumbled upon it in the darkness, that Wolf received the kind of shock that people get when, after some world-changing adventure, they encounter the reproachful sameness of some well-known aspect of hearth and home. And there was Lob! The boy was crouched in a posture like that of a reproachful goblin. He was engaged in cutting with his pocketknife—in spite of the darkness—deep, jagged incisions in the handle of Wolf’s stick! Much time was to pass before those unevennesses in the handle of that oak cudgel ceased to compel its owner to recall with bittersweet vividness the events of that incredible March Wednesday!
“I know’d you’d go rat-hunting,” was his sulky greeting. Evidently to Lob’s mind no other occupation than this could account for their protracted absence from his side. “I know’d you’d do it. Girls is never to be trusted, girls isn’t. ’Tis in their constitution to betray.”
“Good Lord, Lob!” cried Wolf. “Where did you get that sentence? Have you been composing that speech ever since we left?”
“Look here, Sis,” declared the boy, standing in front of her with the air of a robber-chief. “You’ve got to fork out! You’ve got to give threepence to I, or never no more will I take your word!”
But the girl’s tone was now the self-composed, elder sister’s tone.
“I hope you only took one egg, Lob; like I always tell you to.”
“I won,” he repeated obstinately. “I won; so you pays.”
“Show me the egg,” said Gerda. “Where is it? I hope it wasn’t the only one. Have you blown it without making that silly big hole you always make? Show it to me, Lob!”
“I can’t show it to ’ee, for I ain’t got it,” grumbled the boy. “I got a nest, all right; and I got a egg all right. There were four on ’em—all wonderful specks—in thik nest; and I minded what you always says to I, and I only took one.”
“Where is it, then? Show it to us, Lob!”
Lob moved nearer to Wolf. “You won’t let she cheat I of thik threepence,” he pleaded querulously.
“Where is that egg, Lob?” repeated the young girl. “He’s up to something; you mark my words!” she added.
“They girls be never to be trusted, be they?” grumbled the boy, sidling up still closer to Wolf.
“You know perfectly well you can always trust me, Lob!” protested Gerda indignantly. “It’s you who we can’t trust now; isn’t it, Mr. Solent?”
The man looked from one to the other. It amused him to listen to such contending voices from these two blurred spots of whiteness in the dark; while he himself, full of an unutterably sweet indolence, acted as their languid umpire. He was delighted, too, as well as amazed, by the intense gravity with which Gerda took this trifling disagreement. How quaint girls were! If he had caught Lob stealing his very watch in the darkness and transferring it to his own pocket, he felt, just then, that he would hardly have noticed the incident!
“Haven’t I won over she, Mr. Solent?” whined the child. “I found thik nestie fields and fields away from where us be now. ’Twere in monstrous girt hedge, thik nestie, and I scratched myself cruel getting my hand in.”
“Why haven’t you got the egg, then?” insisted the girl, in a hard, accusing voice.
“ ’Cos I broke the bloody thing!” wailed the boy desperately. “I were crossing one of they darned fields and I treadit in a girt rabbit-gin and came near to breaking me neck, let alone thik bloody egg.”
“Lob, I’m right-down ashamed of you!” cried Gerda, in a voice quivering with moral indignation.
“What be up to now, then?” responded the boy. “What be all this hullabaloo about, when a person tells straight out what a person gone and done? If it be so turble hard to ’ee to lose threepence, why did ’ee go rat-hunting with him here and leave anyone all lonesome-like? For all you care, a chap might have been tossed, this here dark night, by some o’ they girt bullicks!”
His voice grew plaintive; but Gerda was unmoved.
“You never found any nest at all, Lob, and you know you didn’t.”
Lobbie’s voice sounded now as if he very soon might burst into tears.
“I shan’t have no shilling! I shan’t have no shilling without I gets the threepence you betted wi’ I!”
Wolf began fumbling in his pocket; but the girl stopped him with a quick movement.
“Lob,” she said sternly, “you’ve never lied to me before, in all the rat-hunts, and nuttings, and blackberryings, and mushroomings we’ve ever had together. What’s come over you, Lob? Oh, I am! ’Tisn’t as if I were Mother or Dad. ’Tisn’t as if we hadn’t always done everything together. You’re not nice company, any more, Lob, for people to go about with! I shall always have to say to anyone in the future, ‘Take care, now, you can never depend upon what Lob Torp says!’ ”
Wolf, seating himself in the darkness upon the fallen tree-trunk, listened in amazement to this dialogue. The moods of women, except for those of his mother, were a phenomenon the ebbings and flowings of which had hardly presented themselves to his deeper consciousness. He obtained now, in listening to Gerda’s righteous anger, an inkling of the supernatural power which these beings have of bringing to bear upon the male conscience exactly that one accusation, of all others, which will pierce it to its heart’s core!
He had no conception of how Gerda had found out that the boy was lying, and he felt at that moment a faint and perhaps scandalous wave of sympathy pass through him for Lobbie Torp.
Lob himself felt this at once with a child’s clairvoyance.
“She’s cross about the threepence,” he whispered, leaning against the man’s knee, “but you’ll pay it, won’t you, Mr. Solent?”
Wolf had grown weary by this time of the whole discussion. He took advantage of the darkness to transfer from his own pocket to that of this fellow wrongdoer at least twice as much as he was demanding.
“Come on,” he said, when the clandestine transaction was accomplished, “let’s get back to the Blacksod road before we’re completely benighted!”
He rose and moved on between them, Lob in penitent and rather shamefaced silence carrying the great wicker-basket, at the bottom of which reposed a few fading marigolds and some handfuls of watercress.
The excitement of climbing over the railings at the very edge of the riverbank, and the pride she took in being able to show her power of guiding her lover through the darkened fields, quickly restored Gerda’s good-humour.
“We’ll drop Lob at the beginning of Chequers Street,” Wolf said, when they at last felt the hard road from Nevilton to Blacksod under their feet. “Do you think,” he went on, “that Miss Malakite will expect us still, so long after teatime?”
“I was going to stay to supper with her,” said Gerda; “so I don’t think it’ll matter. She’ll give us tea, though, late as we are! She won’t have noticed the time at all, very likely. She never does, when her father’s away and she’s reading.”
With the sister and brother leaning against him naturally and familiarly, each on one of his arms, Wolf with his oak-stick held firmly in the hand adjoining the now somewhat dragging and tired bird’s-nester, strode along towards the lights of the town, in a deep, diffused warmth of unalloyed happiness. The days of his life seemed to stretch out before him in a lovely Spring-scented perspective.
The few misgivings that remained to him about his marriage fell away in that hedge-scented darkness—a darkness that seemed to separate the earth from the sky with the formless presence of some tremendous but friendly deity, under whose protection he bore those two along. And as he felt Gerda press his arm softly and lightly against her young body, the sensation came over him that he had only to walk on and on … on and on … just like this … in order to bring that secret “mythology” of his into relation with the whole world.
“Whom Long Thomas has taken for his leman,” he repeated in his heart; and it seemed to him as if the lights of the town, which now began to welcome them, were the lights of a certain imaginary city which from his early childhood had appeared and disappeared on the margin of his mind. It was wont to appear in strange places, this city of his fancy … at the bottom of teacups … or the windowpanes of privies … in the soapy water of baths … in the dirty marks on wallpapers … in the bleak coals of dead Summer-grates … between the rusty railings of deserted burying-grounds … above the miserable patterns of faded carpets … among the nameless litter of pavement-gutters. … But whenever he had seen it, it was always associated with the first lighting up of lamps, and with the existence, but not necessarily the presence, of someone … some girl … some boy … some unknown … whose place in his life would resemble that first lighting of lamps … that sense of arriving out of the cold darkness of empty fields and lost ways into the rich, warm, glowing security of that mysterious town. …
“Whom Long Thomas has taken for his leman,” he repeated once more. And he thought to himself, “It’s all in that word … in that word; and in coming along a dark road to where lamps are lit!”