I
In the house, in which they could not afford to live, it was unpleasantly quiet. Marvellously noisy, but the noises let through silence. The noises were jays, bustling and screeching in the wood, a hay-cutter, clattering and sending up waves of scent, substantial as sea-waves, filling the long rooms as the tide fills a blowhole, but without roar or release. The third noise was the light wind, rising off the diamond-blue sea. The sea lay three parts round the house, invisible because of the wood. The wood rose from its cliff-point in a single tree, and spread out inland, in a fan to enclose the house. Outside the verandah, a small lawn had been hollowed, from which the wood could be seen as it swept up, hurrying with squirrels, into a group of immense ilex, beech and oak. The lawn was stuck with yuccas and tree-fuchsias, dripping season in, season out, with bells the colour of blood.
Once the house was passed, the wood gave it up, enclosed it decently, fenced a paddock, and the slip of dark life melted into the endless turf-miles which ran up a great down into the sky.
The silence let through by the jays, the hay-cutter, and the breeze, was a complicated production of stone rooms, the natural silence of empty grass, and the equivocal, personal silence of the wood. Not many nerves could stand it. People who had come for a week had been known to leave next day. The people who had the house were interested in the wood and its silence. When it got worse, after dark or at midday, they said it was tuning-up. When a gale came up-Channel shrieking like a mad harp, they said they were watching a visible fight with the silence in the wood.
A large gramophone stood with its mouth open on the verandah flags. They had been playing to the wood after lunch, to appease it and to keep their dancing in hand. The house was empty. Their servants had gone over to a distant farm. The wood had it all its own way. They were out.
There were two paths through the wood to the sea. A beeline through the high trees, of fine grass, pebble scattered, springing and wet. Then, across the wet ditch that was sometimes a stream, a path through the copse in figures of eight, whose turns startled people. As the wood narrowed, this way ended in a gate on to the grass, the nearest way to an attractive rabbit-warren. These were the only two paths in that country, except a green road which led from the house over the down to the white road and from thence on to the beginnings of the world, ten miles away.
There was only one house except a shepherd’s cottage, and a little fancy lodge, the wood had swallowed, which they let to a fisherman in exchange for fish. The fisherman was a gentleman, and a fine carver in wood. The shepherd was a troglodyte. He came home drunk in the moonlight spinning round and yelling obscene words to the tune of old hymns. They were equally friends with both. They belonged to the house and the wood and the turf and the sea; had no money and the instincts of hospitality; wanted everything and nothing, and were at that moment lying out naked on a rock-spit which terminated their piece of land.
The cliffs there were low and soft, rounded with a black snout, but based on a wedge of orange stone, smooth and running out square under the sea.
Up and down the channel, high cliffs rose, airy, glittering, but some way off. Their headland was low, their valley shallow and open, spiked only with undersea reefs, no less lovely and disastrous than the famous precipices which made their coast their pride.
“Mare Nostrum,” they said, in Paris or in London, at the sea’s winter takings there. An outlet for a natural ferocity they were too proud to exercise, too indifferent to examine. Also a kind of ritual, a sacrifice, willing but impersonal to their gods.
Meanwhile the weather was good. One of them sat up, and rolled off the reef’s edge into the sea.
A brother and sister to whom the house belonged, and a young man they had known a long time. They called her Scylla from her name Drusilla, altering it because they said she was sometimes a witch and sometimes a bitch. They were handsome and young, always together, and often visited by their friends. It was Felix, the brother, who had swum out. His sister sat up and watched him with the touch of anxiety common to females, however disciplined. “Be careful,” she called, “the tide’s turning.” He wallowed under the sea.
“Leave him alone,” said the other man, “it’s the last day’s peace,” and rolled over on his face and ate pink seaweed.
She approved because it was good for his complexion, wood-brown as they were fair, but she stood up and watched the boy’s head popping in and out of the crisp water. Naked, the enormous space, the rough earth dressed her. The sparkling sea did not. But the sea at the moment was something for the men to swim in, an enormous toy. She thought again: He won’t drown. Besides, why worry? Lay down again, and fed an anemone with a prawn.
“Ross, why do you say ‘the last day’s peace’? You like people when they come.”
He answered:
“One always enjoys something. But this one’s an American.”
“No, we’ve never had one before.”
“I don’t mind ’em. I always like their women. But take it from me, all we shall get out of this one is some fun. He won’t like the wood. The wood will giggle at him.”
“It laughs at us. …”
“We don’t mind—it’s our joke.” He laughed, sitting upright staring down-Channel, his head pitched back on an immensely long neck, his mouth like a wild animal’s, only objectively preoccupied with the world. She thought: Grin like a dog, and run about the rocks, accepting him as she accepted everything there. She said: “Give him a good time and see what happens.” That was her part of their hospitality, whose rewards were varied and irregular. None of them, with perhaps the exception of Felix, could understand a good time that was not based on flashes of illumination, exercises of the senses, dancing, and stretches of very insular behaviour.
Something long and white came up behind them out of the sea. An extra wave washed Felix a ledge higher. “Thank you,” he said and skipped across. “Oh, my dear, I’m sure an octopus caught my leg.”
“D’you remember,” said Ross, “the chap last winter who killed them with his teeth and fainted at the sight of white of egg?”
The pleasant memory united them; they became a triple figure, like Hecate the witch, amused, imaginative. They put on their things: Felix’s pretty clothes, Ross’s rough ones, the girl, her delicate strong dress. With their arms round her shoulders, they crossed the rocks and went up the cliff-path, and through the wood to the house.