Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard (25 page)

Then Hobb said gently, but with his heart beating on his ribs as fast as a swallow's wings beat the air, "I thought you did what you did because at that moment you knew, and I knew also, that it was your right for ever to weep and to laugh on my heart, and mine to bear for ever your laughing and weeping. But if it was not with you as with me, say so, and I will go away and not trouble you or your strange woods again."

Then the woman came quickly to him, and seized his hands saying, half agitated, half commanding, "It was with me as with you. And you shall stay with me for ever in these woods, and I will give you the desire of your life."

"And what shall I give you?" said Hobb.

"Whatever is nearest to yourself," she whispered, "the dearest treasure of your soul." And she looked at him with eyes full of passions which he could not fathom, but among them he saw terror. And with great tenderness he drew her once more to his heart, putting his strong and steady arms around her like a shield, and he said:

"Love whose name I do not know, what is nearer to myself than you, what dearer treasure has my soul than you? If I am to give you this, it is yourself I must give you; and I will restore to you whatever it is that you have lost through the agony of your soul. Be at peace, my love whose name I do not know." And holding her closely to him he bent his head and kissed her lips; and a great shudder passed through her, and then she lay still in his arms, with her strange eyes half-closed, and slow tears welling between the lids and hanging on her cheeks like the rain on the rose. And she let him quiet her with his big hands that were so used to care for flowers. Presently she lifted his right hand to her mouth, and kissed it before he could prevent her. Next she drew herself a little away from him, hanging back in his arms and gazing into his face as though her soul were all a question and his was the answer that she could not wholly read. And last she broke away from him with a strange laugh that ended on a sob.

Hobb said, "Will you not tell me what makes you unhappy?"

"I have no unhappiness," she answered, and quenched her sob with a smile as strange as her laugh. "My foolish lover, are you amazed that when her hour comes a woman knows not whether she is happy or unhappy? Oh, when joy is so great that it has come full circle with pain, what wonder that laughter and weeping are one?"

And Hobb believed her, for ever since he had opened his eyes upon her, he had felt in his own heart more joy than he could bear; and he knew that for this there is no remedy except to find a second heart to help in the bearing. And he knew it was the same with her. But now he saw that she was free for awhile from the excess of joy; and indeed these respites must happen even to lovers for their own sakes, lest they sink beneath the heavenly burden of their hearts. And her smile was like the diver's rise from his enchanted deeps to take again the common breath of man; and Hobb also smiled and said, "Come now, and tell me your name. For though love needs none for its object, I think the name itself is eager to be made known and loved beyond all other names for love's sake. As I love yours, whatever it be."

"My name," she said, "is Margaret."

"It is an easy name to love," said Hobb, "for its own sake."

"And what is yours?" asked she.

And Hobb's smile broadened as he answered, "Try to love it, for my sake. For it is Hobb. Yet it is as fitting to me, who am as plain as my name, as your lovely name is fitting to you."

She cast a quick sly look at him and said, "If love knows not how to distinguish between joy and pain, since all that comes from the heart of love is joy, neither can it tell the plain from the beautiful, since all that comes under the eye of love is beauty. And I will find all things beautiful in my lover, from his name to the mole on his cheek."

For I know now, dear maidens, whether in describing him I had mentioned this peculiarity of Hobb's.

(Jessica: You hadn't described him at all.

Martin: Well, now the omission is remedied.

Jessica: Oh fie! as though it were enough to say the man had a mole on his left cheek!

Martin: Dear Mistress Jessica, did I say it was his left cheek?

Jessica: Why--why!--where else would it be?

Martin: Nowhere else, on my honor. It WAS his left cheek.)

Then Hobb said to Margaret, "What place is this?"

"It is called Open Winkins," said she, and at the name he started to his feet, remembering much that he had forgotten. She looked at him anxiously and cajolingly and said, "You are not going away?" But he hardly heard her question. "Margaret," he said, "I have come from a place that may be far or near, for I do not know how I came; but I think it must be far, since I never saw this forest, or even heard of it, till a moment before my coming. But I am seeking a clue to a trouble that has come upon me this year, and I think the clue may be here. And now tell me, have you in these last four months seen in these woods anything of your people that are my brothers?--a child that once was merry, and a boy that once was brave, and a youth that once was beautiful, and a young man that once was wise? Have these ever been to Open Winkins?"

Margaret looked at him thoughtfully and said, "If they have, I have not seen them here. And I think they could not have been here without my knowledge. For no one lives here but I, and I live nowhere else."

Hobb sighed and said, "I had hoped otherwise. For, dear, I cannot rest until I have helped them." Then he told her as much as he knew of his four brothers; and her face clouded as he spoke, and her eyes looked hurt and angry by turns, and her beautiful mouth turned sulky. So then Hobb put his arm round her and said, "Do not be too troubled, for I know I shall presently find the cause and cure of these boys' ills." But Margaret pushed his arm away and rose restlessly to her feet, and paced up and down, muttering, "What do I care for these boys? It is not for them I am troubled, but for myself and you."

"For us?" said Hobb. "How can trouble touch us who love each other?"

At this Margaret threw herself on the grass beside him, and laid her head against his knee, and drew his hands to her, pressing them against her eyes and lips and throat and bosom as though she would never let them go; and through her kisses she whispered passionately, "Do you love me? do you truly love me? Oh, if you love me do not go away immediately. For I have only just found you, but your brothers have had you all their lives. And presently you shall go where you please for their sakes, but now stay a little in this wood for mine. Stay a month with me, only a month! oh, my heart, is a month much to ask when you and I found each other but an hour ago? For this time of love will never come again, and whatever other times there are to follow, if you go now you will be shutting your eyes upon the lovely dawn just as the sun is rising through the colors. And when you return, you will return perhaps to love's high-noon, but you will have missed the dawn for ever." And then she lifted her prone body a little higher until it rested once more in the curve of his arm against his heart, and she lay with her white face upturned to his, and her dark soft eyes full of passion and pleading, and she put up her fingers to caress his cheek, and whispered, "Give me my little month, oh, my heart, and at the end of it I will give you your soul's desire."

And not Hobb or any man could have resisted her.

So he promised to remain with her in Open Winkins, and not to go further on his quest till the next moon. And indeed, with all time before and behind him it did not seem much to promise, nor did he think it could hurt his brothers' case. But the kernel of it was that he longed to make the promise, and could not do otherwise than make the promise, and so, in short, he made the promise.

Then Margaret led him to two small lodges on the skirts of the forest; they were made of round logs, with moss and lichen still upon them, and they were overgrown with the loveliest growths of summer--with blackberry blossoms, a wonderful ghostly white, spread over the bushes like fairies' linen out to dry, and wild roses more than were in any other lovers' forest on earth, and the maddest sweetest confusion of honeysuckle you ever saw. Within, the rooms were strewn with green rushes, and hung with green cloths on which Margaret had embroidered all the flowers and berries in their seasons, from the first small violets blue and white to the last spindle-berries with their orange hearts splitting their rosy rinds. And there was nothing else under each roof but a round beech-stump for a stool, and a coffer of carved oak with metal locks, and a low mattress stuffed with lamb's-fleece picked from the thorns, and pillows filled with thistledown; and each couch had a green covering worked with waterlily leaves and white and golden lilies. "These are the Pilleygreen Lodges," said she, "and one is mine and one is yours; and when we want cover we will find it here, but when we do not we will eat and sleep in the open."

And so the whole of that July Hobb dwelt in the Pilleygreen Lodges in Open Winkins with his love Margaret. And by the month's end they had not done their talking. For did not a young lifetime lie behind them, and did they not foresee a longer life ahead, and between lovers must not all be told and dreamed upon? and beyond these lives in time, which were theirs in any case, had not love opened to them a timeless life of which inexhaustible dreams were to be exchanged, not always by words, though indeed by their mouths, and by the speech of their hands and arms and eyes? Hobb told her all there was to tell of the Burgh and his life with his brothers, both before and after their tragedies, but he did not often speak of them for it was a tale she hated to hear, and sometimes she wept so bitterly that he had ado to comfort her, and sometimes was so angry that he could hardly conciliate her. But such was his own gentleness that her caprices could withstand it no more than the shifting clouds the sun. And Margaret told him of herself, but her tale was short and simple--that her parents had died in the forest when she was young, and that she had lived there all her life working with her needle, twice yearly taking her work to the Cathedral Town to sell; and with the proceeds buying what she needed, and other cloths and silk and gold with which to work. She opened the coffer in Hobb's lodge and showed him what she did: veils that she had embroidered with cobwebs hung with dew, so that you feared to touch them lest you should destroy the cobweb and disperse the dew; and girdles thick-set with flowers, so that you thought Spring's self on a warm day had loosed the girdle from her middle, and lost it; and gowns worked like the feathers of a bird, some like the plumage on the wood-dove's breast, and others like a jay's wing; and there was a pair of blue skippers so embroidered that they appeared and disappeared beneath a flowing skirt with reeds and sallows rising from a hem of water, you thought you had seen kingfishers; and there were tunics overlaid with dragonflies' wings and their delicate jointed bodies of green and black-and-yellow and Chalk-Hill blue; and caps all gay with autumn berries, scarlet rose-hips and wine-red haws, and the bright briony, and spindle with its twofold gayety, and one cap was all of wild clematis, with the vine of the Traveler's Joy twined round the brim and the cloud of the Old Man's Beard upon the crown. And Hobb said, "It is magic. Who taught you to do this?" And Margaret said, "Open Winkins."

Early in their talks he told her of his garden, and of the golden rose he tried to grow there, and of his failures; and Margaret knew by his voice and his eyes more than by his words that this was the wish of his heart. And she smiled and said, "Now I know with what I must redeem my promise. Yet I think I shall be jealous of your golden rose." And Hobb, lifting a wave of her glittering hair and making a rose of it between his fingers, asked, "How can you be jealous of yourself?" "Yet I think I am," said she again, "for it was something of myself you promised to give me presently, and I would rather have something of you." "They are the same thing," said Hobb, and he twisted up the great rose of her hair till it lay beside her temple under the ebony fillet. And as his hand touched the fillet he looked puzzled, and he ran his finger round its shining blackness and exclaimed, "But this too is hair!" Margaret laughed her strange laugh and said, "Yes, my own hair, you discoverer of open secrets!" And putting up her hands she unbound the fillet, and it fell, a slender coil of black amongst the golden flood of her head, like a serpent gliding down the sunglade on a river.

"Why is it like that?" said Hobb simply.

With one of her quick changes Margaret frowned and answered, "Why is the black yew set with little lamps? Why does a black cloud have an edge of light? Why does a blackbird have white feathers in his body? Must things be ALL dark or ALL light?" And she stamped her foot and turned hastily away, and began to do up her hair with trembling hands. And Hobb came behind her and kissed the top of her head. She turned on him half angrily, half smiling, saying, "No! for you do not like my black lock." And Hobb said very gravely, "I will find all things beautiful in my beloved, from her black lock to her blacker temper." Margaret shot a swift look at him and saw that he was laughing at her with an echo of her own words; and she flung her arms about him, laughing too. "Oh, Hobb!" said she, "you pluck out my black temper by the roots!"

So with teasing and talking and quarreling and kissing, and ever-growing love, July came near its close; and as love discovers or creates all miracles in what it loves, Hobb for pure joy grew light of spirit, and laughed and played with his beloved till she knew not whether she had given her heart to a child or a man; and again when the happiness that was in his soul shone through his eyes, he was so transfigured that, gazing on his beauty, she knew not whether she had received the heart of a man or a god. And the truth was that at this time Hobb was all three, since love, dear maidens, commands a region that extends beyond birth and death, and includes all that is mortal in all that is eternal. And as for Margaret, she was all things by turns, sometimes as gay as sunbeams so that Hobb could scarcely follow her dancing spirit, but could only sun himself in the delight of it; and sometimes she was full of folly and daring, and made him climb with her the highest trees, and drop great distances from bough to bough, mocking at all his fears for her though he had none for himself; and sometimes when he was downcast, as happened now and then for thinking on his brothers, she forgot her jealousy in tenderness of his sorrow, and made him lean his head upon her breast, and talked to him low as a mother to her baby, words that perhaps were only words of comfort, yet seemed to him infinite wisdom, as the child believes of its mother's tender speech. And at all times she was lovelier than his dreams of her. Not once in this month did Hobb go out of the forest, which was confined on the north and north-west by big roads running to the world, and on all other sides by sloped of Downland. But whenever in their wanderings they arrived at any of these boundaries, Margaret turned him back and said, "I do not love the open; come away."