The Elderbrook Brothers (17 page)

‘I want to talk to you, Ellen, if you'll let me.'

They were seated side by side on the fallen tree-trunk. Himself trembling, he seemed to feel the sleek tree tremble, under his curved hand.

‘Why shouldn't I let you?' she answered reasonably. ‘Is it something so dreadful?'

‘Something's happened to me,' he said. ‘It's … well, it's you. That's the whole story. Somehow you've been … haunting me for days. I've been thinking of nothing else.'

During this speech, which seemed to Felix a prodigiously
long one, he kept his eyes away from her, staring at distance. He waited for her to speak.

‘Oh dear,' she said, ‘that
is
a bad job!'

She might almost have been speaking to a child. But he picked up her words and challenged them.

‘Why?' He turned accusing eyes upon her. ‘Why is it a bad job? It's not. It's a good job. It's the best thing that ever happened.'

Her hand moved towards his, where it lay embracing the smooth tree. But she did not quite touch him.

‘Dear Felix! … What am I to say?'

‘It's not the best thing, it's the
only
thing that ever happened. I've been dreaming till now. This is real.
You
're real.'

‘Well, yes,' she said, with a shy approach to banter, ‘I suppose I am. But I don't see why that should trouble you so much. I'm not the only real person in the world, you know.'

‘Yes, but you are,' he said eagerly. ‘That's just it. I can't explain, but that's how it is. You're … everything.'

It did not occur to him to speak of love, of beauty. Nor did he consciously know what response he expected or desired from her. His paramount need was to confess his strange condition, to disburden himself of a secret which had grown too big, and which he had borne alone too long.

‘It's very …' She broke off, and then tried again. ‘It's very nice of you, Felix. But-'

‘Don't be silly,' said Felix. There was astonishment and almost anger in his voice. ‘You know it's not “nice” of me.'

With unaccustomed meekness she answered: ‘Isn't it? I'm so sorry.'

Meeting her rueful glance he smiled, half in apology.

‘You see,' he explained gently, ‘this is serious.'

‘I'm
beginning
to see,' said Ellen. ‘But you haven't made it quite easy, up to now. Are you trying to tell me you're in love with me?'

With ingenuous surprise he said: ‘I suppose I am. Yes, of course I am. But that's only part of it.'

The words were no sooner spoken than they lost meaning for him. All words lost meaning. His laborious groping after statement left him empty of thought and filled only with Ellen. She only was real, and he had no life except in her. The carnal fact of her, the dream made flesh, this living body that was her very self, of this he was suddenly and shatteringly conscious. The naked kindness of her face seemed to soften the grave, troubled look. The ravishing loveliness of lips never looked at before was a sudden intimate revelation. He believed he would die if he did not kiss her.

He clutched at her hand, which lay so near his own. He possessed himself of both her hands, her arms, her shoulders; and the trembling he had felt in the tree-trunk seemed to be in her too, like the beat of music, or the throbbing of the sea.

She suffered his kiss with more than gentleness. Then with an inward effort, as if against her will, she held him at arm's length, wryly smiling.

‘How old are you, Felix?'

He would have kissed her again, but she said sharply:

‘No. Listen!'

‘I'm listening.' He looked mutinous, resolved.

‘I'm older than you. And even if I weren't … it's useless. You're wasting your time.'

‘I'm the best judge of that.' With some return of grace he added, more humbly: ‘So long as I ‘m not wasting yours?'

She gave a light, unmirthful laugh. ‘My time isn't so valuable. What do you want of me, Felix? Just … this?'

‘I want to marry you,' he said firmly. ‘Well, of course. What else?'

‘That's what I was afraid of,' she said sadly. ‘Please put it out of your mind.'

‘Why? Do you mean you don't …'

He could not complete the question. But Ellen did.

‘Love you? Perhaps I do, a little. But that's not the point. Love is easy.'

‘Easy?' He was incredulous.

‘Inevitable,' she said, with a shrug. ‘But marriage isn't, and I shall never marry.'

‘What nonsense!' But he was shaken. ‘Why do you say that?'

‘Because it's true,' said Ellen, ‘and if you'll only keep it in mind everything will be all right between us.'

‘I don't understand a word of that,' Felix announced. He gazed with burning eyes. ‘Why do we waste time arguing?'

She pondered the question, and seemed to ponder too some other question which it set stirring within her. Then her face cleared, as though she had come to a decision.

‘Yes, why do we?' she said.

At sight of her smile his heart turned over. His answer was inarticulate. She gave him her hands again, and her lips.

INCIPIT vita nova: the burden of Dante's story ran in his mind. For a day or two he was in bliss. The glory of the new life was all in all. By her touch, by her liking, by her warm kisses, which no cautionary talking could cancel out, Ellen had undesignedly completed her possession of him. In the moment of that first butterfly kiss, which for Felix was a plighting of troth, she had become the living centre of all beauty and all desire, so that now the very leaves of the tree, the grass growing, the delight of the sun, the chirrup of a bird in the garden hedge, must lead his thoughts back to her. The air was her breathing and dusk was the darkness of her eyes, which yet were not dark, being lit by the glowing mystery within them. Prevent us in all our ways, he said, unaware of any incongruity, if a little surprised to find a traditional prayer expressing so exactly his sense of her abiding presence; for she did indeed appear before him, at every turn, with every pulse of his heart, an enchantment
made visible in whatever of beauty his eye lit upon. Herself, by a paradox that greatly puzzled and tantalized him, he could not see. When he stared straight into memory, trying to visualize her, she seemed always to elude him. He could hold for a moment her eyes, her brows, the noble contours of nose and mouth; but the whole face, the whole visible self of her, he could not recapture by any effort: not till effort was abandoned and forgotten did it sometimes, unexpectedly, briefly, gone as soon as come, flash into his vision as from heaven itself. By his sense of the surpassing value of this one creature the whole of creation was transfigured.

The whole of creation included such hitherto unregarded items as the members of his own household, and those of Ellen's too. He looked on them with new eyes and found them interesting and lovable. He was surprised by the warmth of his sudden affection for Tom, for Daniel, for the servants. The sight of the sky made him want to sing; and when he sauntered out on the lawns he could not refrain from bending down to touch the grass, to stroke it lovingly with his finger-tips in delight of its soft aliveness and green joy. His thraldom, because confessed and unreproved, now seemed to him a new and perfect freedom. Will and desire both pointing the same way, he was free to see Ellen in all things and all things good in Ellen; free to conjure into phantasmal being the ravishing delight of her embraces; free to spend all his active thought in contriving ways of seeing her again, and of being alone with her. In his attitude to the people about him, and especially in his notion of their attitude to himself, he vacillated between two extremes. Filled to overflowing with love, he believed his condition must be plain for all to read; he nevertheless imagined that by giving rein to his high spirits, by being heartily normal, he could throw dust in the world's eyes. In both ideas he was mistaken. No one, unless it were Florrie in one of her wilder flights from reason, had divined the cause of his recent brooding; whereas almost everyone was conscious of the sudden change in him now, and there were some who paused
long enough in their self-preoccupation to wonder what it portended. Felix, because he managed not to blush at mention of Ellen's name, began to consider himself devilish cunning, and an adept in self-control; but though his daily visit to Mrs Meldreth's house was no new thing it could hardly fail to be observed, in time, that it was neither Mrs Meldreth nor her daughters that he went to see. Dimly, through the mists of his obsession, he knew that sooner or later he must give himself away; so that when his betrothal was announced it would be received with the knowing smiles of gratified prophecy.

That a betrothal was in prospect he could not, would not question. Ellen's very positive refusal of him cut no ice. In his ingenuous reasoning her kisses made nonsense of her words. The battle was begun, and he was full of fight. She was everything: he was nothing. He was infinitely unworthy of her. That he could ever deserve her was out of the question; but that he must win her was obvious, since his very life depended on it.

Neglectful in much else, the guardian angel that lived in his subconsciousness did mercifully curb his amorous fantasies. With quickening pulse he recalled the touch of her hands, the responsive pleasure of her lips; but his thoughts halted there, as upon the threshold of an inviolable sanctuary. Bridled by his young idealism, desire was stayed within the bounds of what an earlier generation had applauded as purity and a later one was to deride as repression. Resorting to neither vulgarity, Felix's guardian angel, had he been articulate, would perhaps have called it, in the circumstances, common sense. But idealism and inexperience involved dangers as well as immunities. In the first wonder of a world transfigured Felix could not know that his bliss contained the seed of its own destruction; but he knew, soon enough, that where there had been a deep dazzling contentment, an all-sufficing delight, there was now a restlessness, a fever, a kind of fear. There was indeed such fear, half-secret from himself, as made it an agony that Ellen should ever be out of his sight.

FELIX said: ‘Aren't we going to our tree today?' And Ellen answered: ‘I thought we were going for a walk.' The evasion shocked and dismayed him. Ever since parting from her he had hungered, body and soul, to take her into his arms again. The fallen tree on which they had sat two days ago had for both of them this special meaning. Yesterday he had seen her, but not alone; and yesterday's famine made his present hunger intolerable. Already, though he would have indignantly denied it, the newly discovered intoxication of contact, so far as it went, was becoming an end in itself. Added to his heart's worship was this clamorous need to touch and to kiss: only so, he argued, could he say things otherwise unsayable.

They were already in the woods, but the path she seemed inclined to follow did not lead where he most wanted to go. The habit of pretending in public that she was no more than his friend was in danger of persisting even here. They walked together soberly, with something of constraint between them. Yet the constraint, he half-angrily felt, was on his side alone. She made no intimate sign, and her coolness made him feel clumsy, selfconscious. Seeing her so normal and undisturbed he could almost have believed that the day before yesterday had never happened or was forgotten; and he began to feel half-ashamed of his crude, unspoken desires. To quell that feeling, which he knew must be fatal to all his hopes if it persisted, he clutched at her hand, and halted.

The hand was not withdrawn, but she did not immediately turn to him. He pulled her towards him and put his other hand on her shoulder. In dogged desperation, embarrassed by her neutrality, he moved to kiss her. She offered him her cheek and gave him a light kiss in return.

He flushed painfully. They resumed their walk in silence, he struggling to make it appear that the episode had contented him.

‘I had a letter from home this morning,' he said. ‘My mother's ill.'

‘Is she, Felix? I'm so sorry.'

‘I expect I ought to go and see them.'

‘Yes. She'd like that. I hope it's not anything serious?'

‘I'm afraid it is, rather. Unless my sister Nancy is exaggerating. It'd be quite like her.'

‘But you
will
go, won't you?'

Felix said in a flat tone: ‘Do you want me to go?'

‘Don't be foolish.' She spoke mildly, but he felt like a child rebuked. ‘I'm only thinking of her. You know that.'

‘I expect you think it's funny of me not to have gone before, as soon as term ended.'

‘Not funny. Unusual perhaps. But I'd never given it a thought.'

‘I suppose not. Why should you?' He seemed to take pleasure in turning the knife in his wound. But receiving no answer he presently said: ‘If I had, you and I might never have met.'

‘What a lot of trouble that would have saved you!' said Ellen.

He looked at her in sudden terror. ‘What do you mean?'

She smiled. ‘Oh, nothing too dreadful.' Her smile reassured him. ‘But I
am
being rather a trial to you. You can't deny it.'

Suddenly, without knowing what he intended, he seized and kissed her with passion. She murmured a protest, but his ardour melted her and her mouth grew kind under his. He kissed her again and again, as though he would never stop; but at that she resisted, disengaged herself, and broke away.

Seeing him still unappeased she said quickly: ‘No, Felix. No more.'

‘Why not? I want …'

‘Dear
Felix!' She held him at arm's length. ‘You mustn't get so excited.'

‘Excited? I'm in love with you.'

‘I've made a bad mistake. Unforgivable,' she said.

‘Do you mean you don't like me?'