III
Cool, rested, made up, she went to the station. It is always pleasant to collect someone expected out of a train. She wished it had been someone she wanted, someone known or necessary to be known. Michael, who went with the house—Tony, she wished to know better—Vincent, she might get off with—the peacocks of her world. Then she reminded herself of the pleasure it would be to show a stranger their land, as they knew it, equivocal, exquisite. From what she had observed of Americans, almost certain to be new.
Then she was flying through lanes, an attentive, intelligent old-young man beside her.
“God! What a beautiful place,” he said. When “beautiful” is said, exactly and honestly, there is contact, or there should be. Then, “This is the England we think of. Hardy’s country, isn’t it?”
“Yes, don’t rely too much on the weather and the food.”
“Don’t worry about me. I’ve done some camping.”
Nice man. But when he stood in the verandah and looked about him, he said: “I couldn’t have imagined it.”
At tea, he said: “It seems to me that you have everything. No luxury, but all the beauty there is.”
Slightly overdoing the beauty business—Beauty is a too concentrated food. And what did he mean about luxury? There was a sort of lean splendour about their things, anyhow. Still, his repose and his careful manners flattered her. She wondered when the men would be back, smelling of turf and thyme, and settle him in. Not a sign of them, and she’d told him they’d gone out to get mushrooms, usually picked at dawn. She took him up to his room and left him. Alone, he sat down on the bed, pensive. “Lord!” he said, “how did I get here?” The properties of the room included a bidet, a chart of the coast, and a still-life of poisonous-looking wood flowers, Felix’s work. He thought that the berries were deadly nightshade, which they were. He looked out of the window, the verandah roof sloping beneath him, of slate flags, patched and bound with lichens and ferns, and wondered when and how it had all been put together. His eyes travelled to a yucca, bent like an old man, and opening in a single three-foot spike. Then the wood. He had come out of simple curiosity, and to see something in England off the regulation road. So that was what this Paris bunch did when they got home? What did they do? What was there to do? Where were the men who had asked him? Some kind of trick to leave him alone with the girl?
Getting mushrooms? He decided, for the first time, that mushrooms grew. And that he must carry on, attentively. With immense deliberation the sun was moving west. He stretched his neck out of the window, and saw the crest of the down turn black, and draw up like a tower. He drew in his head. He did not want to see that hill with the stars trembling over it. How did they light the place? I know moonlight, I know starlight. Very sensitive to the arts, he admitted that he soon might be justified in singing that. Lay this body down. What an idea, but he might soon have to do it. To him, straight from London, Paris, and New York, the silence was intolerable.
The wood sighed at him. Just like that. Two kinds of life he did not want. The ash-fair tree-tall young woman downstairs, and the elaborate piece of leaf and wood, that was one thing and many. The wood and the woman might be interchangeable, and it wasn’t the sort of thing you wanted on a visit. He had nerves, too, a great sensibility to take impressions. Always in relation to people. Life to him was an elaborate theatre, without scenery. Here the scenery seemed to be the play.
He got as far as that when he remembered that downstairs there would be certainly something to drink, and began to change, beautifying himself, scrupulously and elaborately as a cat.
He had a cocktail; he had two. A woman came in. Scylla told him she was her old nurse. Was it truth, or a comedy, when she said:
“I found the lobster and the fish Mr. Felix got in the ditch.”
And Scylla answered:
“Where are Mr. Felix and Mr. Ross?”
And the nurse had said:
“You never know. I’ll bring in dinner.”
So they ate together; an eatable meal, fresh-tasting wine, and the inevitable whisky after. A rabbit crossed the lawn. A rat came under the verandah and stole a piece of bread. Two bats flew in. Scylla said:
“They’re full of lice, worse luck.”
Nothing went on happening: the delicate quiet waited on them.
“I expect,” said Scylla, “that they went over to Tollerdown, and found our friends had come to the cottage.”
He thought: The mushrooms are wearing thin. “Where is Tollerdown?”
“One of the hills in this part of the world. You know this country was given its first human character in the late stone age. That’s all the earthworks and barrows you see. Two of our friends have a cottage there. They dress up like the Prince of Wales, and quarrel like dogs. It will be fun if they are there.”
Well, it might be. Anything which would give Dudley Carston a human scene. And if there was one thing in history one could hope was over, it was the stone age. But the young woman’s mind was distracted by the thought of it. She was laughing to herself. Laughing at the stone age. Real, abstract laughter. She had forgotten he was there. That her brother and her friend had disappeared. She might be mad, but she was good-looking. Women lovely and mad, or only lovely and only mad, should not be left alone in woods. Literature did not help him. He could only think of La Belle Dame sans merci, and she wasn’t that kind. She should think of him as a real man, not one of her flighty shadows too careless to be there to receive the stranger they had invited to follow them some hundred miles.
“Shall I go and look for them?” he said.
“Where?” she said—That brought it back—“The openness here is deceptive, and they might come a hundred ways. I’m ashamed of their manners.”
She was telling herself: Something has happened, I think. I told myself this morning I’d watch the scene and not try to make it right. My boy friends can go hang.
The silence went away, and left nothing.
There was an iron clang. Carston sat tight.
“It’s the gate on to the grass,” she said, “here they are.”
Two heavy men syncopating their walk. Must be a march of trolls in the night through the wood. Nothing natural was coming. Four tall young men crowded into the room.
“So you’ve collected Carston?”
The men from Tollerdown, of course.
He saw three men about thirty years old. One tall and black, with close-set eyes and a walk affected to hide his strength, called Clarence. One rougher, shorter, fairer, better bred, called Ross. Then a boy, Scylla’s brother Felix Taverner, the English peach in flower, lapis-eyes, the gold hair already thinning where the temples should have been thatched. Then, last, the tallest they called Picus, grave as a marsh-bird dancing and as liable to agitation, his colour drawn from the moon’s palette, steel gilt and pale, the skin warmed to gold by the weather, cooled to winter in the dark crystal eyes.
Clarence and Picus crowding off to eat in the kitchen. Scylla followed them, but came back.
“Something has happened, I think. If it’s what I think it is, it will be a diversion for you.”
Not so sure, he waited. They came back. Their fatigue was different from his, an affair of the muscles. They seemed drunk on fresh air. He found himself faced with his usual problem, how to make a fresh event serve his turn, relate it strictly to personalities, especially his own.
That was the situation for him, as he listened, translating, to the story Felix had to tell. Felix said that Ross and he had been to a place called Gault, and he’d sung to it. Presumably a dangerous place. They had then decided to call on distant friends, who might or might not be inhabiting a cottage on a place called Tollerdown. Anyhow, supposing they were not there, a rare species of hawk known as a honey-buzzard might be observed in the vicinity. On arriving they had found their friends (Scylla seemed to be the only woman in the group, a point for reflection) in difficulties owing to their well, shrunk by the drought, yielding nothing but dead hedgehogs. A digression on the use of soda-water to make tea. An excursion down the well to clean out the hedgehogs had led to a discovery. An odd cup of some greenish stone had been found, rather like pea-soup carnelian. The state of the well had necessitated the transfer of Picus and Clarence for an indefinite stay. “You’re done in this country if your well gives out. Wait till ours does.” Carston was not interested. This might interfere with his making love to Scylla, which he had decided was to be his expression of a successful visit. Unless he found out how to use it.
Then Ross produced the cup suddenly, out of his pocket, and handed it round. Carston said:
“That means nothing to me.”
“Been cut by hand,” said Felix. “Is there a kind of opaque flint glass? Celtic twiddles, I think, very worn round the rim.”
A good deal was told Carston, casually, about Celts and Saxons and Romans and early Christianity; things completely over so far as he knew—Not that they talked about what he hadn’t heard. Only they talked as if there was no time, no progress, no morality. He knew, of course, that there was no progress, and no morality.
Then Ross said, roughly and softly, as though he was loving something:
“The thing was that we fished it out with a spear.”
Scylla said, “Ross, that’s odd.”
Clarence fidgeted attentively. Felix stared, and Carston saw the boy’s tricky brilliant eyes light up. Picus was grave, a man so tall and thin he seemed to go on forever. Unnaturally supple, he had seen him pick up something behind him as if it had been in front. He tried to think what a spear had to do with it.
Felix said, sharply:
“Good old Freud.”
“Idiot!” said Ross, and turned away furious and contemptuous.
“It seems to me,” said Scylla, “that people had to start some way of thinking of things. What they saw once they’d learned to think might be quite different from the things they’d learned on.”
Then, to Carston, she said that odd things were always happening, and old patterns repeated themselves. That it was sometimes alarming when they did, and Freud very useful in the case of irrational fear. Very true, too, when there had been a row, and no one could feel what was just and what was not. Always look out for the suppressed wish that’s taken a wrong turning. But that what had happened today was objective and odd.
Carston said:
“I think I’ll have to ask you to explain a little more than that.”
But Ross had turned round again. “I’m awfully sorry,” he said. The insolent insincerity was not meant to be lost on Carston, but it was. “Put it down to the solstice or the heat.”
“Tell us the news,” said Felix. “We couldn’t get back without our tea. Ross believes in perspiration. I don’t.”
Carston had come with elaborations of the best gossip. They listened to him—rather too attentively, he thought. At the same time there was something that spoiled his effects. It was the place, the faintly lit room mixing with the starlight outside. A shallow little green dish was lying among the glasses. Might have been made out of star-material. The woman had called it a diversion, but they weren’t going to let him play. He began suddenly to dislike them, wish to humiliate them. Far too troubled to think how to do it.
Even Ross saw there was something wrong when he left them and went up to bed.
But this Carston had seen. Four ways of saying the woman good night. Ross nodded to her. Felix embraced her. Clarence kissed her gallantly, with a flourish indicating affectionate indifference to their difference of sex. Picus, busy with a syphon, crooked his forefinger at her across the room.