Unknown (95 page)

It was a Saturday afternoon; and resting against the warm bank of a high hawthorn hedge, John and Mary Crow were watching the tall pale-gold stalks of a ripe cornfield over against Bulwark's Lane leading to Bushey Combe.

The girl wore a cream-coloured frock covered with little light-green spots, like the spots upon the inside wings of the butterfly called a Green-veined White. She had on black stockings and very thin shoes, and as she lay between the golden wheat-stalks and the tall hedge-grasses, she allowed one of her outstretched hands to caress the cloudy pink blossoms of a tuft of fumitory. Her white straw hat lay on the ground beside her feet, upside down, and into the place where her head would naturally have been, John was now with meticulous care constructing an imaginary thrushes' nest out of twisted blades of grass and bits of rubble.

Her face was averted from his as she lay on her side but, as they both rested on their elbows, John would vary his preoccupation with her up-turned hat by allowing his long nervous fingers alternately to rumple up and restraighten that green-spotted frock, so warm, as was the form beneath it, in the glowing afternoon sun.

The girl's whole being responded to these satyrish caresses with a luxurious and delicious contentment of mind and body, such as she had not known for many a long month.

She had been married now to John for exactly two days and she had at last persuaded—or believed she had persuaded—Miss Drew to allow her to live with him in that Northload room, while she continued to spend the bulk of each day in her old employment as that lady's companion. They had not yet had their first night together; but ever since they had been married, secretly but not surreptitiously, by Mat Dekker in St. John's Church, the unbedded bride had been transferring her clothes and other private belongings to this happy retreat, the first menage that she could call her own! Whether it would be tonight that the grand move wTould be made or tomorrow, Sunday night, she was not quite sure. She had extracted a sort of reluctant half-promise from Miss Drew that it should be tonight; but on that issue she was prepared to be flexible, if, when it came to the point, it had to be tomorrow instead!

John also was happier than he had been for months: probably as happy as he had ever been since that day on the Northwold “big river.” This girl by his side seemed on that w^arm August afternoon to satisfy his whole nature in a way that he had more than once doubted it ever could be satisfied.

What a delicious mystery—frond-leaf beneath frond-leaf, shell-whorl beneath shell-whorl, calyx beneath calyx—the identity of a girl was! It seemed to John, as he followed with his electric fingers the delicate curves of this body lying by his side and as he threw out one trifling remark after another, just to hear her voice, just to note what such a being would say, or wouldn't say, that the renunciation of all this made by Sam Dekker was a monstrous outrage upon life.

“I'll set Mary at him!” he thought to himself, and then he thought, “No! he won't listen to any girl. I must fight it out with him myself. It's mad what he's doing. The fellow's worse than a murderer. He's got the uttermost mystery of mysteries under his fingertips, and instead of worshipping it he's starving it to death!”

He had a delicious opportunity for enjoying Mary at this moment with his most intense idolatry and concentrated fetish-worship ; for her back being turned to him, she could not distract him by any look.

Both her words and her silences, as he caressed them now, along with the rest, seemed to have about them the very lines and curves of this form that he found so intensely appealing. “What is it,” he thought to himself, as he contemplated her long slim legs in their black stockings, “what is it about a girl's shape that excites a person so?”

The girl seemed in such a dreamy and passive state just then that she appeared ready to yield to the least pressure of the hands that caressed her, John took advantage of this to make her lie prone on her face, where she seemed perfectly content to stay quite motionless inhaling the sun-warm aromatic smells of those infinitesimal plants such as tiny yellow pansies, that seem to love wheatfields better than any other place, and idly pushing at the brim of her grass-filled hat with the tips of her shoes.

He began strewing her prone limbs now with little bits of grass taken from the bird's nest he had made. Holding these grasses in the air above her, he let them fall down in showers; and it pleased him to watch which of them would find rest upon her, and which would drift aside into the hedge-weeds, caught by some scarce-perceptible breath of the soft southerly wind. “What is it about the way they are made?” he asked himself again; and it seemed to him that the most exquisite thrill came to him—the thrill that was at once most satyrish and most infinitely tender—from the feeling of the piquancy of such desirable limbs being inseparably united to a conscious mind—a mind that bore about with it, wherever it went, this sweet provocative burden. “But it's only,” he thought to himself as he stopped strewing her with grass and began smoothing down that cream-coloured frock, “because it's Mary! If this were another girl, instead of what I feel I should feel either savage lust or furious disgust. God! I would not stay here a second with another girl—except of course Lisette; but that's different. I'd hate for another girl to think to herself, 'I've got him! He likes me!' Fd hate for another girl to have that kind of triumph.”

The maliciousness he now began to feel towards this imaginary other one drew to itself all that natural loathing of the opposite sex felt in certain moods by both men and women; but such was John's nature that he could take this repulsion, this sex-loathing, which is a far more powerful and deep-rooted feeling than any mere sex-hatred, and bury it in the ground; bury it as a dog might bury a piece of offal, knowing that if his maliciousness or his roguery required it, he could dig it up.

The chances are that for pure unmitigated lechery John Crow ranked highest among the whole population of Glastonbury. Others might have far more powerful erotic sensations; but for pure delight derived from lust. John would, with one exception, have carried away the palm. This exception Mas Angela Beere, the chaste-looking, unapproachable daughter of old Lawyer Beere. Angela lived for nothing else but for erotic dreaming— her mind by night and day was a temple full of “chain-swung censers” to the Cyprian; and in this temple was a sacred niche that was occupied by many different figures, but by onlv one figure at a time. At present the niche was occupied by the figure of Persephone; and it was before the figure of Persephone that Angela prostrated herself exactly in the same way that John prostrated himself before Mary. Between the pleasure that Angela was enjoying, at this very minute of time, as she sat at her easel—for she dabbled in water colours—sketching among the Abbey Ruins, by calling up Persephone's form, and the pleasure that John derived from the actual presence of Mary's there was no difference at all.

Above every community, above every town, there are invisible Powers hovering, as interested in the minnows, male and female, swimming about in that particular human aquarium, as Mat Dekker was in his fish.

It is only a very few human beings, however, in each community, who are able to slip out of their skins and share this super-mundane observation of themselves. For the most part the inhabitants of a given locality—or aquarium—just go blindly on, unconsciously swimming about, following their affairs, obeying their necessities, pursuing the smaller fry, making their weed-nests or their mud-nurseries. Nor have we any right to assume—rather the contrary—that the few persons, who have this power of slipping out of their skins and joining those supermundane naturalists, are nobler, or even wiser, than the rest. Very often they are the extreme weaklings—dwelling on the verge of nervous idiocy.

In Glastonbury at this particular epoch, John Crow, Persephone Spear, and that emaciated son of Dickery Cantle, whose wasted legs so troubled Mr. Geard, were probably the only ones who could attain this detached view. And certainly it would be absurd to maintain that any of these was nobler, or wiser, or nearer the secret of life than Mr. Geard for instance, or than Miss Elizabeth Crow, neither of whom ever looked down, so to speak, from above the surface of the aquarium. At this particular moment of the fifteenth of August, that is to say at nine minutes and forty seconds past three o'clock, had any of these supermundane naturalists been studying the physical and psychic movements of the Glastonbury aquarium, they would certainly have come to the conclusion that John Crow, contemplating the real figure of Mary toying with the little wild pansies, and Angela Beere contemplating the imaginary figure of Persephone, first in one aspect and then in another, as she sketched the famous ruin usually known as .St. Joseph's Chapel, were the two water-creatures whose amorous excitement was most intense. And quite apart from super-mundane observers it is likely enough that the most desirable of all electric vibrations is just this very sort of erotic desire, neither altogether gratified nor altogether denied.

A small red poppy, such as linger on after their season, with so many other cornfield plants, was dying in front of him and a great black slug wTas drawing its slime over the pink pea-like petals of a little rest-harrow. But the curious shrivelled blackness of the dying poppy, with a strange wet look upon it, as if it wept in its death, or as if it poured forth the most hidden store of all its hoarded nepenthe, for nothing but the voyaging south wind, that needed no anodyne nor any healing, to take and carry away, did not lessen John's emotion.

Into the poppied juices of black death's own veins that perfect sweetness by his side had crept, cozening him, cajoling him, anointing him, with an ointment that was like a Lethe within Lethe, an oblivion within oblivion.

The girl's yieldingness and sweetness as she lay there, bathed in that golden sunshine and in those flickering shadows, seemed to extend itself, like an element of eternal kindness and reassurance, to everything in life.

The little rest-harrow seemed indeed to be holding its breath till the black slug passed on its way; but its leaves were sturdy. The slug had eaten only one pea-shaped petal. And lo! in a moment the small strong plant could breathe again! A scarf of rainbow-glittering slime it would wear till night-fall, but even if no dews washed it down there would probably be rain in a dav or two and naught left of that trail. What a thing that he had found a creature so sweet, so divinely chiselled by the Teat Pygmalion of the universe! There had been a long epoch in his life, all those years in France—though Lisette had been generous and tender—when he would have mocked at the idea of finding such absolute content, such fathomless peace of mind, in idolising a girl's body.

It had nothing to do with Glastonbury; that was certain! No. it was in Norfolk they had met, and to Norfolk they would return one day.

Propping himself up upon his left arm and looking across the girl's body, he could see the mouth of a big rabbit-hole; and beyond that, lying close under the hedge, an old disused plough. Upon one of the handles of this plough, which stretched up towards the sky, some child or some tramp had tied a fragment of red flannel, such as might once have been an old woman's petticoat. The sight of this object sent quivering through John's mind a sudden piercing sense of the tragic pell-mell of human life upon the earth. That bit of red petticoat tied to the plough seemed to become a symbol—like a gallant flag held up by the old battered sun-warmed earth—that there yet remained, in spite of everything, a hope, a chance, faint, so faint! but still a chance, that all the hideous miseries beneath the sun might have, down deep underneath them, some issue, some flickering outlet, some remedial hope.

“If there is,” thought John, “it's through women that it comes to us now.” It seemed to him at that moment as if upon the kindness of women, upon the yieldingness and patience of women, and upon a certain reassurance—the mere absence from their nature of the horns of the male beast—that their presence gives, as of the anonymous weeds and hedge-rubble under his fingers, all hope for better things depended. “They are all profoundly immoral,” he thought. “This accursed Glastonbury saint-myth that has gone, like bad wine—like wine made of the poison-berries of that Levantine thorn tree in the churchyard—into so many heads in this degenerate town, has never really appealed to women—they have always seen through it—they have always known it for what it is.”

John, now finding the hand that clutched at the weeds growing paralysed and numh from supporting him so long as he thus leaned upon it, moved his position and sat up straight, hugging his knees with his wrists.

“As long as I don't move or speak,” thought the prostrate girl to herself, “he will go on loving me!” And it indeed seemed as if Mary was not mistaken in this, for it was as if all that earth-born, sun-warmed bread of life, rising from the tops of its millions of golden stalks, had entered into John's being, giving to the thrilling happiness with which he enjoyed her—all untouched as she was—an infinity of protraction. The hum of insects, the shivering music of the larks, as if their very heart-strings were voluble within those little up-borne handfuls of feathers, the distant barking of sheep-dogs, the* monotonous refrain of some invisible chiff-chaff in a hedge elm a hundred yards away, the sight of a mountainous ridge, slope upon slope, peak upon peak, of huge white clouds on the southern horizon, and, above all, that delicious appearance known as heat waves which he could see hovering beyond the plough handles, like floating nets, he thought, with which the elementals of the air fish for the amorous dreams of plants and mosses and lichen and stones, as the sun draws them forth—all these things partook of the sweetness of the girl he loved and became part of that sweetness.

“'How lucky I am,” thought John, “to have had the wit to escape all the traps that the Evil Spirit sets for nervous, excitable, hypnotised men and women. If I were Sam Dekker, I should be saying to myself 'what ought I to be doing now? What's my next labour and burden, 0 Lord of Miseries and Sorrows?5 If I were poor old Tom I should be rushing madly from wench to wench, trying to forget that I hadn't money enough to live in Norfolk or buy an airplane! If I were Philip I'd be working ten solid hours a day, building up my business. If I were Evans—but it's beyond me to know what goes on behind those Silurian eyebrows. But—0 you wheat-stalks and little bindweeds!—I'd like to leave some dint, some signal, some impress upon this very exact spot; so that in future times, when some miserable Philip or Sam or Tom comes groaning along this hedge looking for a branch on that chiff-chaff tree to hang himself on. he may suddenly step into what these air beggars call a pocket of incredible happiness; and think to himself :God! Ill trick the Devil yet.”*'