The Project Gutenberg eBook ofDusty answerThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Dusty answerAuthor: Rosamond LehmannRelease date: January 6, 2024 [eBook #72642]Language: EnglishOriginal publication: NYC: Henry Holt and Company, 1927Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DUSTY ANSWER ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Dusty answerAuthor: Rosamond LehmannRelease date: January 6, 2024 [eBook #72642]Language: EnglishOriginal publication: NYC: Henry Holt and Company, 1927Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
Title: Dusty answer
Author: Rosamond Lehmann
Author: Rosamond Lehmann
Release date: January 6, 2024 [eBook #72642]
Language: English
Original publication: NYC: Henry Holt and Company, 1927
Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DUSTY ANSWER ***
DUSTY ANSWER
By
Rosamond Lehmann‘Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soulWhen hot for certainties in this our life!’George Meredith.NEW YORKHenry Holt and Company1927ToGeorge RylandsCOPYRIGHT, 1927,BYHENRY HOLT AND COMPANYFIRST PRINTED IN AMERICASEPTEMBER, 1927.PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICABYQUINN & BODEN COMPANY, INC.
Part One,Part Two,Part Three,Part Four,Part Five.
WHEN Judith was eighteen, she saw that the house next door, empty for years, was getting ready again. Gardeners mowed and mowed, and rolled and rolled the tennis-court; and planted tulips and forget-me-nots in the stone urns that bordered the lawn at the river’s edge. The ivy’s long fingers were torn away from the windows, and the solid grey stone front made prim and trim. When the blinds went up and the familiar oval mirror-backs once more stared from the bedroom windows it seemed as if the long time of emptiness had never been, and that the next-door children must still be there with their grandmother,—mysterious and thrilling children who came and went, and were all cousins except two who were brothers, and all boys except one, who was a girl; and who dropped over the peach-tree wall into Judith’s garden with invitations to tea and hide-and-seek.
But in truth all was different now. The grandmother had died soon after she heard Charlie was killed. He had been her favourite, her darling one. He had, astoundingly, married the girl Mariella when they were both nineteen, and he just going to the front. He had been killed directly, and some months afterwards Mariella had had a baby.
Mariella was twenty-two years old now, Charlie’s widow with a child Charlie had begotten. It seemed fantastic when you looked back and remembered them both. The grandmother had left the house to Mariella, and she was coming back to live there and have a gay time now that the war was well over and Charlie (so you supposed) forgotten.
Would Mariella remember Judith next door, and how they used to share a governess and do the same lessons in spite of Mariella’s four years’ seniority? Miss Pim wrote: ‘Judith is an exceptionally clever child, especially about essays and botany. She laps up knowledge as a kitten lapsmilk’. The letter had been left on Mamma’s desk: unforgettable, shameful, triumphant day.
Mariella on the other hand—how she used to sit with her clear light eyes blank, and her polite cool little treble saying: ‘Yes, Miss Pim,’ ‘No, Miss Pim,’—and never be interested and never understand! She wrote like a child of six. She would not progress. And yet, as Miss Pim said, Mariella was by no means what you’d call a stupid girl.... By no means a stupid girl: thrilling to Judith. Apart from the thrill which her own queerness gave, she had upon her the reflected glory of the four boy-cousins who came for the holidays,—Julian, Charlie, Martin and Roddy.
Now they were all grown up. Would they come back when Mariella came? And would they remember Judith at all, and be glad to see her again? She knew that, anyway, they would not remember so meticulously, so achingly as herself: people never did remember her so hard as she remembered them,—their faces especially. In earliest childhood it was plain that nobody else realized the wonder, the portentous mystery of faces. Some patterns were so pure, so clear and lovely you could go on looking at them for ever. Charlie’s and Marietta’s were like that. It was odd that the same bits of face shaped and arranged a little differently gave such deplorable results. Julian was the ugly one. And sometimes the ugliest faces did things that were suddenly lovely. Julian’s did. You dared not take eyes off a stranger’s face for fear of missing a change in it.
‘My dear! How your funny little girl stares. She makes me quite uncomfortable.’
‘Don’t worry, my dear. She doesn’t even see you. Always in the clouds.’
The stupids went on stupidly chattering. They little knew about faces. They little knew what a fearful thing could happen to a familiar face—Miss Pim’s for instance—surprised off its guard and broken up utterly into grossness, withered into hatred or cunning; or what a mystery it was to see a face day after day and find it always strange andsurprising. Roddy’s was that sort, though at first it had seemed quite dull and flat. It had some secret in it.
At night in bed she invented faces, putting the pieces together till suddenly there they were!—quite clear. They had names and vague sorts of bodies and lived independent lives inside her head. Often they turned out to have a likeness to Roddy. The truth was, Judith thought now, Roddy’s was a dream rather than a real face. She felt she had never seen it as it actually was, but always with that overstressed significance, that haunting quality of curiousness which a face in a dream bears.
Queer Roddy must be twenty-one now; and Martin twenty; and Julian twenty-four at least; and beautiful Charlie would have been Mariella’s age if such an incredible thing had not happened to him. They would not want anything to do with her. They would be grown up and smart, with friends from London; and she still had her hair down and wore black cotton stockings, and blushed wildly, hopelessly, eternally, when addressed in public. It would be appalling to meet them again, remembering so much they had certainly forgotten. She would be tongue-tied.
In the long spaces of being alone which they only, at rarer and rarer intervals, broke, she had turned them over, fingered them so lovingly, explored them so curiously that, melting into the darkly-shining enchanted shadow-stuff of remembered childhood, they had become well-nigh fantastic creatures. Presumably they had realised long ago that Charlie was dead. When they came back again, without him, she would have to believe it too. To see them again would be a deep wrenching sort of hurt. If only it could be supposed it would hurt them too!... But Charlie had of course been dead for years; and of course they did not know what it was to want to know and understand and absorb people to such a degree that it was a fever. Or if they did, it was not upon her, trifling female creature, that they applied their endeavours. Even Martin, the stupid and ever-devoted, had felt, for a certainty, no mysterious excitement about her.
When she looked backwards and thought about each of them separately, there were only a few odd poignant trivialities of actual fact to remember.
Mariella’s hair was cut short like a boy’s. It came over her forehead in a fringe, and beneath it her lucid mermaid’s eyes looked out in a blind transparent stare, as if she were dazzled. Her skin was milk-white, her lips a small pink bow, her neck very long on sloping shoulders, her body tall and graceful with thin snakey long limbs. Her face was without expression, composed and cool-looking. The only change it ever suffered was the perfect upward lift of the lips when they smiled their limited smile. Her voice was a small high flute, with few inflections, monotonous but soft and sweet-tempered. She spoke little. She was remote and unruffled, coolly friendly. She never told you things.
She had a great Dane and she went about alone with him for choice, her arm round his neck. One day he was sick and started groaning, and his stomach swelled and he went into the thickest part of the laurel bushes and died of poison in half an hour. Mariella came from a French lesson in time to receive his dying look. She thought he reproached her, and her head, fainting in anguish, fell over his, and she said to him: ‘It wasn’t my fault.’ She lay beside him and would not move. The gardener buried him in the evening and she lay on the grave, pale, extinguished and silent. When Judith went home to supper she was still lying there. Nobody saw her cry, and no one ever heard her speak of him again.
She was the one who always picked up naked baby-birds, and worms and frogs and caterpillars. She had a toad which she loved, and she wanted to keep a pet snake. One day she brought one home from the long-grass meadow; but Miss Pim had a faint turn and the grandmother instructed Julian to kill it in the back yard.
Charlie dared her to go three times running through the field with the bull in it, and she did. Charlie wouldn’t. She could walk without a tremor on the bit of the roof that made everyone else feel watery inside; and she delighted inthunderstorms. Her hair crackled with electricity, and if she put her fingers on you you felt a tiny tingling of shock. She was elated and terrifying, standing at the window and smiling among all the flashes and thunder-cracks.
Julian was the one she seemed to like best; but you never knew. She moved among them all with detached undemanding good-humour. Sometimes Judith thought Mariella despised her.
But she was kind too: she made funny jokes to cheer you up after tears. Once Judith heard them whisper: ‘Let’s all run away from Judy’—and they all did. They climbed up the poplar tree at the bottom of the garden and made noises out of it at her, when she came by, pretending not to be looking for them.
She went away and cried under the nursery sofa, hoping to die there before discovery. The darkness had a thick dusty acrid smell, and breathing was difficult. After hours, there were steps in the room; and then Mariella lifted the sofa frill and looked in.
‘Judy, come out. There’s chocolate biscuits for tea.’
With a fresh burst of tears, Judith came.
‘Oo! You do look cry-ey.’ She was dismayed. ‘Shall I try to make you laugh?’
Mariella unbuttoned her frock, stepped out of it and danced grotesquely in her holland knickers. Judith began to giggle and sob at the same time.
‘I’m the fat man,’ said Mariella.
She blew out her cheeks, stuffed a cushion in her knickers and strutted coarsely. That was irresistible. You had to squeal with laughter. After that the others came in rather quietly and were very polite, not looking till her face had stopped being blotched and covering her hiccups with cheerful conversation. And after tea they asked her to choose the game. So everything was all right.
It was autumn, and soon the lawn had a chill smoke-blue mist on it. All the blurred heavy garden was as still as glass, bowed down, folded up into itself, deaf, dumb and blindwith secrets. Under the mist the silky river lay flat and flawless, wanly shining. All the colours of sky and earth were thin ghosts of themselves: and on the air were the troubling bitter-sweet odours of decay.
When the children came from hiding in the bushes they looked all damp and tender, with a delicate glow in their faces, and wet lashes, and drops of wet on their hair. Their breath made mist in front of them. They were beautiful and mysterious like the evening.
The happiness was a swelling pressure in the head and chest, too exciting to bear. Going home under the willows in the little connecting pathway between the two gardens Judith suddenly made up some poetry.
Stupid funny serious Martin had red cheeks and brown eyes and dirty knees. His legs were very hairy for his age. He had an extremely kind nature. He was the one they always teased and scored off. Charlie used to say: ‘Let’s think of a sell for Martin,’ and when he had been sold, as he always was, they danced in front of him shouting: ‘Sold again! Sold again!’ He never minded. Sometimes it was Judith who thought of the best sells, which made her proud. She was very cruel to him, but he remained faithful and loving, and occasionally sent her chaotic sheets of dirt and ink from school, signing them: ‘Yrs truly, M. Fyfe.’
He loved Roddy too,—patiently, maternally. Sometimes they went about each with an arm round the other’s neck; and they always chose each other first in picking sides. Judith always prayed Charlie would pick her first, and sometimes he did, but not always.
Martin had coagulated toffee in one pocket and hairy acid drops in the other. He was always eating something. When there was nothing else he ate raw onions and stank to Heaven.
He was the best of them all at running and chucking, and his muscle was his fondest care and pride. What he liked best was to take Roddy or Judith in the canoe and go bird’s nesting up the creek. Roddy did not tease him about Judith—Roddy never cared what other people did enough to tease them about it—but the others were apt to, so he was rather ashamed, and spoke roughly and pushed her in public; and only showed he loved her when they were alone together.
Once there was hide-and-seek and Charlie was he. Martin asked Judith to hide with him. They lay in the orchard, under the hay-stack, with their cheeks pressed into the warm sweet-smelling turf. Judith watched the insects labouring over blades of grass; and Martin watched her.
‘Charlie’s a long time coming,’ said Judith.
‘I don’t think so. Lie still.’
Judith dropped back, rolled over and surveyed him out of the corner of an eye. His face seen so near looked funny and rough and enormous; and she laughed. He said:
‘The grass is wet. Sit on my chest.’
She sat on his hard chest and moved up and down as he breathed. He said:
‘I say, which do you like best of us all?’
‘Oh, Charlie.... But I like you too.’
‘But not as much as Charlie?’
‘Oh no, not as much as Charlie.’
‘Couldn’t you like me as much?’
‘I don’t think so. I like him better than anyone.’
He sighed. She felt a little sorry for him and said:
‘But I like you next best,’ adding to herself, ‘I don’t think’—a sop to God, who was always listening. For it was an untruth. Roddy came next, then Julian, and then Martin. He was so boring and faithful, always following her round and smelling slightly of perspiration and dirt, and so entirely under her thumb that he almost had no part in the mysterious thrillingness of the children next door. She had to think of him in his detached aspects, running faster than anyone else, or diving for things at the bottom of the river before he became part of it: or else she had to remember him with Roddy’s arm flung over his shoulder. That gave him a glamour. It was thrilling to think of being friendswith a person—especially with Roddy—to that extent. It was no use praying that Charlie would be willing to walk about like that with her. He would never dream of it.
Charlie was beautiful as a prince. He was fair and tall with long bright golden hair that he tossed back from his forehead, and a pale clear skin. He had a lovely straight white nose, and a girl’s mouth with full lips slightly apart, and a jutting cleft chin. He kept his shirt collar unbuttoned, and the base of his throat showed white as a snowdrop. His knees were very white too. Judith thought of him night and day. At night she pretended he was in bed beside her; she told him stories and sang him to sleep: and he said he liked her better than anyone else and would marry her when they grew up. He went to sleep with a moonbeam across his brow and she watched over him till morning. He fell into awful dangers and she rescued him; he had accidents and she carried him for miles soothing his groans. He was ill and she nursed him, holding his hand through the worst of the delirium.
He called out: ‘Judith! Judith! Why don’t you come?’ and she answered: ‘I am here, darling,’ and he opened his eyes and recognised her and whispered, ‘Stay with me,’ and fell into a peaceful refreshing sleep. And the doctor said, ‘We had all given him up; but your love has pulled him through.’
Then she fell ill herself, worn out with watching and anxiety. Charlie came to her and with tears implored her to live that he might show his gratitude. Sometimes she did; but sometimes she died; and Charlie dedicated his ruined life to her, tending her grave and weeping daily. From the bottom of the grave she looked up and saw him pale and grief-stricken, planting violets.
Nothing in the least like that ever really happened in spite of prayers. He was quite indifferent.
Once she spent the night next door because Mamma and Papa were away and Nurse’s mother was going at last. It seemed too exciting to be true, but it happened. Thegrandmother said she was Mariella’s little guest, so Mariella showed her the visitors’ lavatory. Charlie met her coming out of it, and passed by politely, pretending not to notice. It was a great pity. She had hoped to appear noble in all her works to him. There was no chance now. It nearly made the visit a failure.
They had a midnight feast of caramels and banana mess which Julian knew how to make because he was at Eton; and next morning Charlie did not come to breakfast and Julian said he had been sick in the night and gone to Grannie. He was always the one to be sick after things. They went up to see him, and he was in bed with a basin beside him, flushed and very cross. He turned to the wall and told them to get out. He spoke to the grandmother in a whining baby voice and would not let her leave him. Julian muttered that he was a spoilt sugar-baby and they all went away again. So the visit was quite a failure. Judith went home pondering.
But next time she saw him he was so beautiful and lordly she had to go on worshipping. Secretly she recognised his faults, but it was no use: she had to worship him.
Once they turned out all the lights and played hide and seek. The darkness in the hall was like crouching enormous black velvet animals. Suddenly Charlie whispered: ‘Come on, let’s look together;’ and his damp hand sought hers and clutched it, and she knew he was afraid of the dark. He pretended he was brave and she the frightened one, but he trembled and would not let go her hand. It was wonderful, touching and protecting him in the dark: it made the blackness lose its terrors. When the lights went on again he was inclined to swagger. But Julian looked at him with his sharp jeering look. He knew.
Julian and Charlie had terrible quarrels. Julian was always quite quiet: only his eyes and tongue snapped and bit. He was dreadfully sarcastic. The quiet things he said lashed and tortured Charlie to screaming frenzies; and he would give a little dry bit of laugh now and thenas he observed the boiling up of his brother. Once they fought with croquet mallets on the lawn, and even Mariella was alarmed. And once Charlie picked up an open penknife and flung it. Julian held his hand up. The knife was stuck in the palm. He looked at it heavily, and a haggard sick horror crept over his face and he fainted with a bang on the floor. Everybody thought he was dead. But the grandmother said ‘Nonsense’ when Martin went to her and announced the fatality; and she was right. After she had revived and bandaged him, poor trembling Charlie was sent in to apologise. Later all the others went in, full of awe and reverence, and everybody was rather embarrassed. Charlie was a trifle hysterical and turned somersaults and threw himself about, making noises in his throat. Everybody giggled a lot with the relief, and Julian was very gentle and modest on the sofa. After that Julian and Charlie were better friends and sometimes called each other ‘Old chap.’
Once at a children’s gymkhana that somebody had, Charlie fell down; and when he saw a trickle of blood on his knee he went white and began to whimper. He never could bear blood. Some of the gymkhana children looked mocking and whispered, and Julian came along and told them to shut up, very fiercely. Then he patted Charlie on the back and said: ‘Buck up, old chap,’ and put an arm round him and took him up to the house to be bandaged. Judith watched them going away, pressed close to each other, the backs of their heads and their thin childish shoulders looking lonely and pathetic. She thought suddenly: ‘They’ve no Mother and Father;’ and her throat ached.
Charlie sometimes told you things. Once, after one of the quarrels, chucking pebbles into the river, he said:
‘It’s pretty rotten Julian and me always quarreling.’
‘But it’s his fault, Charlie.’
‘Oh, I dare say it’s just as much mine.’
Magnanimous Charlie.
‘Oh no, he’s so beastly to you. I think he’s a horrid boy.’
‘Rot! What do you know about it?’ he said indignantly. ‘He’s ripping and he’s jolly clever too. Much cleverer than me. He thinks I’m an awful ass.’
‘Oh, you’re not.’
‘Well he thinks so,’ he said gloomily. ‘I expect I am.’
It was terrible to see him so depressed.
‘Idon’t think so, Charlie.’ Then fearfully plunging: ‘I wish you weremybrother.’
He hurled a pebble, watched it strike the water, got up to go and said charmingly:
‘Well, I wish you were my sister.’
And at once it was clear he did not really mean it. He did not care. He was used to people adoring him, wanting from him what he never gave but always charmingly pretended to give. It was a deep pang in the heart. She cried out inwardly: ‘Ah, you don’t mean it!...’ Yet at the same time there was the melting glow because he had after all said it.
Another time he took a pin out of his coat and said:
‘D’you see what this is?’
‘A pin.’
‘Guess where I found it.’
‘In the seat of your chair.’
The flippancy was misplaced. He ignored it and said impressively:
‘In my pudding at school.’
‘Oh!’
‘I nearly swallowed it.’
‘Oh!’
‘If I had I’d ‘a’ died.’
He stared at her.
‘Oh,Charlie!...’
‘You can keep it if you like.’
He was so beautiful, so gracious, so munificent that words failed....
She put the pin in a sealed envelope and wrote on it. “The pin that nearly killed C.F.” with the date; and laid it away in the washstand drawer with her will and a bit ofuncut turquoise, and some shells, and a piece of bark from the poplar tree that fell down in the garden. After that she was a good deal encouraged to hope he might marry her.
Sometimes Charlie and Mariella looked alike—clear, bloodlessly cool; and they both adored dogs and talked a special language to them. But Charlie was all nerve, vulnerable, easy to trouble; and Mariella seemed quite impervious. They disliked each other. He thought she despised him, and it made him nag and try to score off her. Yet they had this subtle likeness.
Sometimes Charlie played the piano for hours. He and Julian remembered tunes in their heads and could play them correctly even if they had only heard them whistled once. If one could not remember a bar, the other could: they supplemented each other. It was thrilling to hear them. They were wrapped in shining mists of glory. When Charlie sang Christmas carols his voice was heart-breakingly sweet and he looked like the little choir boy, too saintly, too blue-eyed to live,—which made Judith anxious. The grandmother used to wipe her eyes when he sang, and say to Judith, just as if she had been grown up, that he was the image of his dear father.
The grandmother did not love Julian in the same way, though sometimes in the evening she would stroke his rough stormy-looking head as he lay on the floor, and say very pityingly: ‘Poor old boy.’ He used to shut his eyes tight when she said it, and let himself be stroked for a minute, then jerk away. He always did things twice as vehemently as other people. He never shut his eyes without screwing them up. At first you thought he was just beastly, but later you found he was pathetic as well and knew why she said: ‘Poor old boy’ with that particular inflection. Later still you varied hating him with almost loving him.
Judith was the only one he never mocked at. She was quite immune. He did not always take notice of her, of course, being at Eton, and she much younger; but when he did, he was always kindly—even interested; so that it seemedunjust to dislike him so much, except for Charlie’s sake.
He was an uncomfortable person. If you had been alone with him it was a relief to get back to the others. His senses were too acute, his mind too angular. He would not let anything alone. He was always prying and poking restlessly, testing and examining, and making you do the same, insistently holding your attention as long as he wanted it, so that his company was quite exhausting. He always hoped to find people more intelligent, more interesting than they were, and he would not let them alone till he had discovered their inadequacy and thrown them away.
But the more he poked at a person’s mind, the more that person withdrew. He had that knack. He spent his time doing himself no good, repelling where he hoped to attract. He was of a didactical turn of mind. He loved instructing; and he knew so much about his subjects and was so anxious to impart all he knew that he would go on and on and on. It was very tiresome. Judith was too polite to show her boredom, so she got a lot of instruction. Sometimes he tried when they were alone together to make her tell him her thoughts, which would have been terribly embarrassing but that he soon lost interest in them and turned to his own. He himself had a great many thoughts which he threw at her pell mell. He had contemptuous ideas about religion. He had just become an unbeliever, and he said ‘God’ in quite an ordinary unashamed conversational voice. Sometimes she understood his thoughts, or pretended to, to save the explanation, and sometimes she let him explain, because it made him so pleased and enthusiastic. He would contort himself all over with agony searching for the right, the perfect words in which to express himself, and if he was satisfied at the end he hummed a little tune. He loved words passionately: he invented very good ones. Also he made the most screamingly funny monstrous faces to amuse them all, if he felt cheerful. Generally however, he was morose when they were all together, and went away alone, looking as if he despised and distrusted them. Judith discovered he did notreally prefer to be alone: he liked one other person, a listener. It made him light up impetuously and talk and talk. The others thought him conceited, and he was; yet all the time he was less conceited than self-abasing and sensitive, less overbearing than diffident. He could not laugh at himself, only at others; and he never forgave a person who laughed at him.
He told untruths to a disconcerting extent. Judith told a great many herself, so she was very quick to detect his, and always extremely shocked. Once the grandmother said:
‘Who broke the punt pole?’
And they all said:
‘I didn’t.’
Then she said patiently:
‘Well, who went punting yesterday?’ And Martin, red and anxious with his desire to conceal nothing cried joyfully: ‘I did.’—adding almost with disappointment: ‘But I didn’t break the pole.’ His truthfulness was quite painfully evident. Nobody had broken the pole.
Julian whistled carelessly for a bit after that, so Judith knew.
Sometimes he invented dreams, pretending he had really dreamt them. Judith always guessed when the dreams were untruths, though often they were very clever and absurd, just like real dreams. She made up dreams too, so he could not deceive her. She knew the recipe for the game; and that, try as you would, some betraying touch was bound to creep in.
In the same way he could not deceive her about the adventures he had had, the queer people he had met, plausible as they were. Made-up people were real enough, but only in their own worlds, which were each as different from the world your body lived in as the people who made them were different from each other. The others always believed him when they bothered to listen; they had not the imagination to find him out. Judith as a fellow artist was forced to judge his lies intellectually, in spite of moral indignation.
He was rather mean about sweets. Often he bought a bagful of acid drops, and after handing them round once went away and finished them by himself. Sometimes when Judith was with him he sucked away and never once said: ‘Have one.’ But another time he bought her eightpence worth all to herself and took her for a beetle walk. He adored beetles. He knew their names in Latin, and exactly how many thousand eggs a minute they laid and what they ate, and where and how long they lived. Coming back he put his arm round her and she was proud, though she wished he were Charlie.
He read a lot and sometimes he was secretive about it. He stayed in the bath room whole afternoons reading dictionaries or the Arabian Nights.
He was the only one who was said to know for certain how babies were born. When the others aired their theories he laughed in a superior way. Then one day after they had all been persuading him he said, surly and brief: ‘Well, haven’t you noticed animals, idiots?’ And after they had consulted amongst themselves a bit they all thought they understood, except Martin, and Marietta had to explain to him.
Julian played the piano better than Charlie; he played so that it was impossible not to listen. But he was not, as Charlie was, a pure vessel for receiving music and pouring it forth again. Judith thought Charlie undoubtedly lapped up music as a kitten lapped milk.
Julian said privately that he intended to write an opera. It was too thrilling for words. He had already composed a lovely thing called ‘Spring’ with trills, and an imitation of a cuckoo recurring in it. It was wonderful,—exactly like a real cuckoo. Another composition was called ‘The Dance of the Stag-Beetles.’ That was very funny. You simply saw the stag-beetles lumping solemnly round. It made everybody laugh—even the grandmother. Then Roddy invented a dance for it which was as funny as themusic; and it became a regular thing to be done on rainy days. Julian himself preferred ‘Spring.’ He said it was a bigger thing altogether.
Roddy was the queerest little boy. He was the most unreal and thrilling of all because he was there so rarely. His parents were not dead like Julian’s and Charlie’s, or abroad like Martin’s or divorced and disgraced like Mariella’s. (Mariella’s mother had run away with a Russian Pole, whatever that was, when Mariella was a baby; and after that her father ... there Nurse had broken off impressively and tilted an imaginary bottle to her lips when she was whispering about it to the housemaid.)
Roddy’s parents lived in London and allowed him to come on a week’s visit once every holiday. Roddy scarcely ever spoke. He had a pale, flat secret face and yellow-brown eyes with a twinkling light remote at the back of them. He had a ruffled dark shining head and a queer smile that you watched for because it was not like anyone else’s. His lip lifted suddenly off his white teeth and then turned down at the corners in a bitter-sweet way. When you saw it you said ‘Ah!’ to yourself, with a little pang, and stared,—it was so queer. He had a trick of spreading out his hands and looking at them,—brown broad hands with long crooked fingers that were magical when they held a pencil and could draw anything. He had another trick of rubbing his eyes with his fist like a baby, and that made you say ‘Ah!’ too, with a melting, quick sort of pang, wanting to touch him. His eyes fluttered in a strong light: they were weak and set so far apart that, with their upward sweep, they seemed to go round the corners and, seen in profile, to be set in his head like a funny bird’s. He reminded you of something fabulous—a Chinese fairy-story. He was thin and odd and graceful; and there was a suggestion about him of secret animals that go about by night.
Once Judith saw a hawthorn hedge in winter, shining darkly with recent rain. Deep in the heart of its strongmaze of twigs moved a shadowy bird pecking, darting silently about in its small mysterious confined loneliness after a glowing berry or two. Suddenly Judith thought of Roddy. It was ridiculous of course, but there it was: the suggestion came of itself with the same queer pull of surprise and tenderness. A noiseless, intent creature moving alone among small brilliancies in a profound maze: there was—oh, what was there that was all of Roddy in that?
He was so elastic, so mercurial in his movements, when he chose, that he did not seem true. He had a way of swinging down from the topmost branch of a tree, dropping lightly, hand below hand, as if he were floating down, and then, long before he reached the usual jumping-place, giving himself easily to the air and landing in a soft relaxed cat-like crouch.
Once they set out to attempt the huge old fir-tree at the edge of the garden. The thing was to get to the top before someone below counted fifty. Julian, Mariella, Martin tried, and failed. Then Roddy. He swung himself up and soon after leapt out from a branch and came down again, pronouncing it too uncomfortable and filthy to be bothered about. Judith looked up and saw the wild swirl of twigs so thick all the way up that no sky showed through. She said to herself: ‘I will! I will!’ and the Spirit entered in to her and she climbed to the top and threw a handkerchief out of it just as Martin said fifty-seven. After that she came down again, and received congratulations. Martin gave her his lucky thripenny as a prize, and she was swollen with pride because she, the youngest, had beaten them all; and in her exaltation she thought: ‘I can do anything if I say I can,’ and tried again that evening to fly through the power of faith but failed.
Afterwards when she was resavouring in secret the sweet applause they had given her she remembered that Roddy had said nothing,—just looked at her with twinkling eyes and a bit of his downward smile; and she thought he had probably been laughing at her for her enthusiasm and her pride. Shefelt disillusioned, and all at once remembered her bruises and her ruined bloomers.
Roddy had no ambition. He did not feel at all humiliated if he failed to meet a challenge. If he did not want to try he did not try: not because he was afraid of failing, for he knew his power and so did everyone else; and not because he was physically cautious, for fear was unknown to him: it was because of the fundamental apathy in him. He lived in bursts of energy followed by the most lethargic indifference.
When he chose to lead they all followed; but he did not care. He did not care whether he was liked or not. He never sought out Martin, though he accepted his devotion kindly and did not join in the sells arranged for him. But then he never joined in anything: he was not interested in personal relationships.
They were all a little afraid of him, and none of them—except Martin to whom he was as a son—liked him very much.
The things he drew were extremely odd: long dream-like figures with thin legs trailing after them, giants and pigmies and people having their heads cut off, and ghosts and skeletons rising from graves and flapping after children; and people doing wild dances, their limbs flying about; and amusing monsters and hideous terrifying old women. His caricatures were the best. The grandmother said they were very promising. Julian was always the most successful subject, and he minded dreadfully.
Sometimes Judith sat beside him and watched his quick pencil. It was like magic. But always he soon gave up. He had scarcely any interest in his drawings once they were finished. She collected them in sheaves and took them home to gloat over. That he could execute such things and that she should be privileged to observe and to gather up after him!... His drawings were more thrilling even than the music of Julian and Charlie. She could play the piano herself quite nicely, but as for drawing,—there was another clear case of the unreliability of the Bible. However muchyou cried: ‘I can, I can!’ and rushed, full of faith, to pencil and paper, nothing whatever happened.
Once she was suddenly emboldened and said out loud the words rehearsed silently for many weeks,
‘Now draw something forme, Roddy.’
Oh, something designed from its conception for your very own,—something which could be labelled (by yourself, since Roddy would certainly refuse) ‘From the artist to Judith Earle,’ with the date: a token, a perpetual memorial of his friendship!...
‘Oh no,’ said Roddy, ‘I can’t.’ He threw down his pencil, instantly bored at the suggestion, smiled and presently wandered off.
The smile took the edge off the sting, but there was an old feeling, an oppression, as she watched him going away. It was no use trying to bring Roddy out of his labyrinthine seclusion with personal advances and pretensions to favouritism. Roddy had a power to wound far beyond his years; he seemed grown up sometimes in his crushingness.
Now and again he was very funny and invented dances on the lawn to make them laugh. His imitation of a Russian ballet-dancer was wonderful. Also he could walk on his hands or do backward somersaults into the water. This was very thrilling and made him highly respected.
Once he and Judith were the two hares in a paper chase. Roddy spied an old umbrella in the hedge and picked it up. It was tattered and gaunt and huge; and there was something friendly about it,—a disreputable reckless jollity. He carried it for a long time, swinging it round and round, and sometimes balancing it on his chin or spearing things with it. At the top of the hill they came to the pond covered with green stuff and a white starry froth of flowers. All around grew flags and forget-me-nots, and the hundred other rare enchanting trivialities of watery places.
‘Well, I don’t want this old umbrella,’ said Roddy. He considered the water. ‘Do you?’
‘No. Throw it away.’
He flung it. It alighted in the middle of the pond. It stuck—oh, horror!—upright, caught in something, and refused to sink.
‘Oh, Roddy!’
It stared at them across the waste of waters, stark, forlorn, reproachful. It said: ‘Why did you pick me up, encourage and befriend me when this is what you meant to do?’
‘Well, come on,’ said Roddy.
They fled from it.
They fled from it, but ah!—it pursued them. From miles away it wailed to Judith in a high thin squeak: ‘Save me! Save me!’ They made excuses to each other for spoiling the paper chase, and going back the same way. Their feet were compelled, driven.
The pond lay fair and flawless in the evening light. The umbrella was drowned.
Roddy stood at the edge and bit his lip. He said:
‘Well, I almost wish I hadn’t thrown the poor old chap away.’
She nodded. She could not speak.
The place was haunted for ever.
But what remained more deeply in her memory was the bond with Roddy, the sharing of an emotion, the secret sympathy. Avidly she seized upon it, and with it nourished her immoderate ambitions. One day they would all like her better than anyone else: even Roddy would tell her every thing. Their lives, instead of being always remote and mysterious would revolve intimately round her. She would know all, all about them.
From that far off unsubstantial time Roddy’s face was the last, the clearest, the strangest to float up.
There was a field with chalky pits in it and ripening blackberries and wastes of gorse and bracken. The curioussmell of the bracken rose faint but penetrating, earthy and yet unreal, disturbing.
She was staring in horror at a dead rabbit lying in the path. It was stretched on its side with its tiny frail-boned paws laid out quiet, and the tender secret white fur of its underneath half revealed. One of them—which?—she could never remember—said:
‘Well, I never thought I’d touch it.’
It was like hearing a person speak in a bad dream.
‘How did you do it?’ said Roddy’s voice.
‘Well, it was sitting, and I crept up and chucked a stone to startle it up, not meaning to hurt it. But I must have hit it plumb behind the ear,—I killed it outright anyway. It was an absolute fluke. I couldn’t do it again if I tried all my life.’
‘Hum,’ said Roddy. ‘Funny thing.’
He stood with his hands in his pockets looking down at the corpse, making his face a mask. The sun wavered and darkened. The surface of the bracken shone with a metallic light, the grass was lurid, the trees hissed. Judith struggled in a nightmare.
‘Well, what shall I do with it?’ said someone.
‘I’ll see to it,’ said Roddy.
Then he and she were alone. She bent down and touched the fur. It was dead, it was dead. She fell on her knees beside it and wept.
‘I say,don’t,’ said Roddy after a bit. He could not bear tears.
She wept all the more, awful sobs from the pit of the stomach.
‘He didn’t mean it, it can’t be helped,’ said Roddy. Then after another interval:
‘You know, it didn’t feel it. It died at once.’
It died at once. Oh, how pathetic, how unbearable.... Then again, after a long time:
‘Look, we’ll take it home and give it a funeral.’
He gathered huge fern-leaves and gently wrapped therabbit in them. She picked it up: she would carry it, though she almost fainted with anguish at the feel of its tender thin body. She thought: ‘I am holding something that’s dead. It was alive a few minutes ago and now it’s—what is it?’—and she felt choked, drowning.
They set off. Weeping, weeping she carried the rabbit down the hill into the garden; and Roddy walked silently beside her. He went away and dug a hole under a laurel bush in the thickest part of the shrubbery. But when it came to the final act, the burying, she could not bear it at all. She was beyond all coherence now, a welter of sobs and tears.
‘I say,don’t,’ said Roddy again in a shaking voice.
She was suddenly quiet with shock; for he sounded on the verge of breaking down. He could not endure her grief. Out of the corner of a sodden eye she saw his face start to break up. Quickly she yielded the body, and he took it away.
He was gone a long time. When he came back he took her arm and said:
‘Come and look.’
Under the laurel bush, at the head of the little mound he had set up a beautiful tablet. It was the top of a cake tin, smooth and clean and shining; and on it he had hammered out with a nail the words: ‘In memory of a Rabbit.’
Peace and comfort flowed in upon her....
The rabbit was under all that quiet and green gloom, under the chill stiff polished moulding of the great laurel leaves, no longer terrible and pathetic, but dignified with its memorial tablet, lapped in the kind protecting earth, out of reach of flies and boys and the mocking stare of the sun. It was all right. There was not any sorrow.
‘Oh, Roddy!’
He had done it to please her. Charlie would not have done it, Martin could not have. It was a purely Roddy gesture, so unlike him, you would have supposed, and yet, when it was done, so recognisably his gesture and only his. Incalculable Roddy! She remembered how when Martin had sprained his ankle and moaned, he had hovered roundhim in distress, with a puckered face. He could not stand the unhappiness and pain of people.
She wanted to kiss him, and did not dare. She looked at him, the whole of herself flowing towards him in a warm tumult of gratitude, and quickly touched his arm; and he looked back, withdrawing himself for fear of thanks, smiling his obscure downward smile. She thought: ‘Shall I never, never understand him?’
She saw the sky beginning to blossom with evening. The sun came out below flushed clouds and all the treetops were lit up, sombrely floating and rocking in a dark gold wash of light. Across the river the fields looked rich and wistful, brimming with sun, cut with long violet shadows. The river ran a little wildly, scattered over with fierce, fire-opal flakes. But all was softening, flattering. The clouds were drifting away, the wind was quiet now; there would be an evening as still, as carved as death.
She saw it all with the quivering overclear senses of exhaustion. It was too much. Roddy’s pale face was all at once significant, and all the others, even Charlie, floated away while she looked at him and loved him. And as she looked she saw the deep light falling on him and he seemed mingled with the whole mysterious goldenness of the evening, to be part of it; and she felt herself lost with him in a sudden dark poignant intimacy and merging,—a lifting flood, all come and gone in a timeless moment.
But afterwards it did not seem true. She only remembered that next time she saw him he had been quite ordinary and indifferent, and she herself, still looking for signs and wonders, chilled with disappointment. Roddy as a child grew dim after that; and the rabbit’s grave that she had meant to tend and keep sweet with flowers through the changing seasons, grew dim too. After a while she could not even remember exactly where it was in all that shrubbery. The rabbit lay forgotten.
The others faded too. She could recapture nothing moreof them. They were cut off sharp in a final group on the hillside, as if horror had in that instant made a night and blotted them out for good.
Then the grandmother let the house and went away to seek a less damp air for her rheumatism. Being alone came again as the natural stuff of life, and the children next door were gone and lost, as if they had never been.
Then they came again—straying so suddenly, strangely, briefly across the timeless confusions of adolescence, that they left behind them an even more disturbing sense of their unreality,—an estrangement profounder than before.
It was winter—the time of the long frost and the ten days’ skating,—the time when crossing the river to get to the skating pool was dangerous because of the great blocks of ice coming down with the stream. Those ten days flashed out for ever in life,—a sparkling pure breathless intoxication of movement and light and air that seemed each evening too delightful to be allowed to last; and yet each succeeding morning—she first listening to the day then fearfully peeping at it—had miraculous prolongation. She prayed:Oh God, let the skating last. Let me skate. Take not my happiness from me and I will love Thee as I ought.And for ten days He hearkened unto her.
Each day she abandoned lessons and, crossing the river, ran across the crunching frost-bound marsh to the edge of the pond. Over and over it the people slipped, glided, swirled with shouts of laughter in the sun. Their lips were parted, their eyes shone, they were beautified.
She wore a white sweater and a crimson muffler. At first people looked at her and then they began smiling at her; and soon she was greeting all those who came regularly and smiling at fresh strangers every day.
There was a girl who came each morning from the London train. She was slender and fair, and she skated withthe flying grace of a dream. Her pleated skirt swung out as she moved, her feet in their trim boots were narrow and small, and when she twirled her long slim legs showed to the knee. She appeared like a goddess in the midst of the cheerful sociable incompetent herd. Judith skated to and fro in front of her every day, hoping in vain for a look; for she was proud and absorbed and ardent, holding herself aloof and noticing no one, skating and skating till it got dark. One day she brought a handsome young man with her, and to him was not at all proud and indifferent.
They waltzed, they spun, they cut figures, they ran hand in hand, they laughed at each other; and when they rested they sat side by side talking and smoking cigarettes. Unlike his companion, the young man looked at Judith not once but many times: and then he smiled at her; then he whispered something to the goddess, and Judith’s heart beat wildly. But the cold scornful creature merely glanced once in a bored way, nodding and went on skating. When evening fell and they were preparing to go he looked up from taking off his boots as Judith passed, and radiantly smiling with white teeth and blue eyes, said ‘Good night.’ That was, to her regret, the only time she saw this handsome and friendly young man, whose wife she would have been pleased to be.
There was an old gentleman with glasses and a grey moustache who skated very sedately and who took a great deal of trouble to teach her the outside edge. He called her ‘my dear’, and his eyes gazed at her from behind his glasses with a hungry watery wistfulness. He had little if any conversation, but he would clear his throat and open his mouth as he looked at her as if for ever on the verge of some tremendous confidence. There was also a common but polite boy with pimples who could skate very fast indeed and who for several afternoons raced panting up and down the ice, while she hung on to the belt of his Norfolk jacket, and shrieked.
The tenth morning was Saturday. The London train brought several parties. The goddess had a little girl with her. There were many vulgar shouting groups of incompetents, and one or two quiet and moderately proficient ones. Judith noticed a curious trio of tall slender refined looking people—two boys and a girl. They sat on the bank and slowly ate sandwiches. When they had finished they got up and stood grouped together, making no movement to adjust the skates they carried. As soon as they stood up, Judith recognized them: Mariella, Julian and Charlie.
It had happened.
They had not changed much, but they had grown most alarmingly. Mariella must be close on six foot. Her body had merely been stretched out without much alteration of the long vague curves of childhood. She hardly dared look at the boys: they were enormous.
That was Charlie, really Charlie, that yellow-headed one, a little wild-looking, more beautiful than ever.... She felt choked.
At that moment Mariella’s eyes fell on her. A fearful blush and heart-beating went all through her, and she turned hastily away. But she could feel them observing, questioning, conferring about her. She executed a perfect half-circle on the outside edge, and felt that now, if they did recognise her, she could just bear it.
Somebody was calling from the edge.
‘Hey! Hey! Hi!’
She looked round cautiously. There was no doubt about it. Charlie was calling her, and they were all nodding and beckoning. They could, it seemed, easily bear to recognize her, and the sight of her skating towards them caused them no apparent faintness or anguish.
Charlie said rather peevishly:
‘I say, how do youdoit? That turn thing. Who taught you?’
Judith was dumb.
‘She doesn’t recognize us,’ said Mariella with a little giggle. ‘YouareJudith Earle, aren’t you?’
‘Oh yes. Oh, Ido. Only you’ve grown so.’ She tried to look at them and to her horror felt the tears smart under hereyelids. ‘I didn’t expect——’ Her mouth was trembling, and she stopped in despair, hanging her head.
It was such a shock, such a deep pang of joy and misery.... They would not understand.... After all these years of thinking about them, seeing them so passionately, nursing in her imagination their unreal and dream-like existence, that they should all at once quite casually be there! It was almost as if dead people were to come to life. She prayed to be swallowed up in the ice.
‘Well, you’re no pigmy,’ said Julian.
And they all laughed. Then it was all right. They ceased to swell and waver before her eyes, settled down, began to grow real.
‘Well, I don’t know how it’s done,’ said Charlie, still rather angrily looking at the ice. ‘Mariella, what on earth did you drag us here for? You don’t know any more than I do how it’s done. What a stupid waste of a day!’ The stress of his petulance made his voice, which was breaking, squeak suddenly now and then, in the funniest way, so that nobody could have taken him seriously.
‘Well, you needn’t have come.’ Mariella’s voice was still cool and childish. With her little smile, she turned away from him to watch the skaters.
‘And my feet are so cold I can’t feel them,’ went on Charlie. ‘Three great gawps, that’s what we are, three great gawps.’ He looked at Mariella’s back. ‘And Mariella’seasilythe gawpest.’
That seemed to unburden him, for he suddenly threw off his bad temper and laughed.
‘Put on your skates, chaps,’ he said. ‘We’ll do our damndest.’
He began to whistle and sat down, struggling with his boots.
‘Judith shall show us how it’s done. She is soextremelyable.’ He looked at her, giving her his attention for the first time, and charmingly smiled. His eyes were amazing when they looked full at you—brilliant, icy-blue, a little too wideopen. His long red girlish lips still parted a trifle in repose; and the whole head had a breath-taking extravagance of beauty.
‘How are you, Judith?’ he said. ‘Do you remember the dear old days?’
‘Yes, I do.’
What self-possession he had! She was not up to him. He lost interest in her, and went on with his boots, fiercely whistling.
‘Do you really still live here, Judith?’ said Mariella.
‘Yes, really. Where do you live?’
‘Well, we’re in London now. Grannie moved there to be near my school. Where do you go to school?’
‘I don’t. I have classes by myself with a man who coaches boys for Oxford and Cambridge. He’s a vicar. And then I have music lessons from a person who comes from London, and Daddy teaches me Greek and Latin. My Mother and Father don’t believe in girl’s schools.’ That sounded rude and priggish. She blushed and added. ‘But I do. It’s awfully dull by myself.’
‘Why don’t you get your Mother to send you to my school?’ said Mariella. ‘It’s ripping fun. You could come up to London every day.’
‘Mariellalovesher school,’ said Julian. ‘It’stopping. She doesn’t learnanythingand plays hockeyallday. Judith’s parents want her to beeducated, Mariella. You don’t understand. Isn’t that so, Judith?’
Judith blushed again and was afraid it was so.
‘I believe in female education,’ muttered Julian to his boots.
They had become extremely queer creatures as they grew up, thought Judith. The boys especially were very peculiar, with their height and pallor and their trick of over-emphatic speech. Julian was immensely tall and cadaverous, with a stormy, untidy, hideous face, and eloquent eyes that seemed always to be changing colour in their deep sockets.He actually had lines in his cheeks, and his nose was becoming hooked, with dilated, back-sweeping nostrils.
‘Well, I wish you’d come,’ said Mariella unruffled, after a silence. ‘It’s ripping. You’d love it.’
It was nice of Mariella to be so friendly and pressing. Perhaps she had always been very fond of you, had missed you.... Judith’s heart warmed.
‘I wishyou’dcome back and live here, Mariella. It was so lovely when you did.’
‘I’d like to,’ said Mariella complacently. ‘P’raps we will some day. If Grannie’s rheumatism would only get better we might come every summer.’
‘But it never will get better,’ said Julian. ‘Not at her age.’
The boots were all on at last, the skates fastened. They got up and wobbled out a few inches on to the ice. There was a chorus of ‘Hell!’ ‘Wow!’ ‘Goodness!’
Charlie slipped up with a crash, Mariella followed him.
‘It’s beastly,’ he said furiously. ‘You can’t keep your skates still. I think I’ve broken my wrist. I shall go home.’ The others took no notice. They wobbled further and further out, giggling. They were too tall and thin to balance properly, and their ankles kept on betraying them.
‘Come and help us, Judith,’ screamed Julian. ‘We’ve never skated before in ourlives. We can’tstop. We’re too thin to be allowed to fall down.’
They were dragging each other on helplessly.
‘Comehere,’ wailed Charlie. ‘Judith, come and help me to stand. Shan’t we fall in? Are you sure it’s safe? My feet arefrozen.’
Judith giggled as she went from one to the other encouraging, admonishing, supporting. The three ridiculous sillies! They enjoyed their silliness, they enjoyed making her laugh, they were not a bit frightening after all. Never, never since she had bidden them good-bye years ago had been such warm and bubbling happiness. Everything delightful was really starting at last.
As they began to improve they became ambitious. They declared their desire to learn fancy skating, and Charlie swore he would cut a figure of eight before the day was out; and all the time they were simply no good at all. Out of the corner of an eye Judith saw the old gentleman and the boy in the Norfolk jacket wistfully looking on, and she ignored them.
‘Now, come along Mariella,’ said Charlie. ‘Take hands like this, crossed, and we’ll go for a glide.’ They sailed rather haltingly away.
Under Mariella’s blue wool cap the dark short hair curled softly upwards now, longer than the boyish crop of yore. Her face had preserved its pure and innocent mask. She was laughing, not as other people laughed, unreservedly in the enjoyment of physical pleasures, but rather as if she were making a concession to Charlie’s mood, and found the abandonment of laughter alien to her. There was still the curious likeness between the two clear bloodless faces, though Charlie’s was forever changing with quick emotions and Mariella’s was still, empty almost. They would understand each other, thought Judith. In spite of the friction that used to go on between them, they had always been more obviously, more oppressively blood-relations than any other members of the circle. With years the bond had become even more subtly defined.
Julian was left out. He had never taken any notice of Mariella, yet he had always been the one upon whom her light gaze had dwelt with a faint difference, as if it meant to dwell. In the old days it had sometimes seemed as if she would have been pleased—really pleased, not just indifferently agreeable as she generally was—if Julian had offered to take her for a beetle-walk. She appeared to have a slight respectful interest in him, and a manner which suggested, though only to a remorseless watcher, that she would have valued his good opinion. It still seemed so. When he was teasing her about her school, her eyes, uncertain yet dwelling, had fallen on him a moment; but now, as formerly, you could detect no affection between them.
‘We wondered if we should meet you,’ said Julian shyly. ‘I’m so glad we did.’
Then they had not completely forgotten. She blessed him for the assurance, which only he would have given.
‘I couldn’t believe it was you,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think I’d ever see you again. I did miss you after you went. I thought perhaps Martin might write to me, but he didn’t. How is Martin?’
‘He’s all right. We don’t see him so much now. His people are back from Africa and he spends most of the holidays with them.’ He smiled and added: ‘I remember Martin was terribly devoted to you. I must tell him I’ve seen you.’
‘And where’s Roddy?’
‘Oh, Roddy.... He’s all right. He’s in London. Roddy’s very grown up: he’s having dancing lessons.’ Julian snorted.
‘Does he still draw?’
‘I don’t know. Should think he’s too lazy.’
Julian had never liked Roddy.
‘Do you still compose, Julian?’
‘Oh, do you remember that?’ He smiled with pleasure.
‘Of course. The “Stag-Beetles” Dance. And “Spring with the Cuckoo in it.”’
‘Oh, that rot. Fancy your remembering!’ He looked at her in just the old way, amused but interested, thinking well of her.
‘I thought it was beautiful. Have you written anything lately?’
‘No. No time. I’ve given it all up. I’ve been working like mad for a scholarship. P’raps I’ll take to it again a bit at Oxford.’
He seemed to have become enthusiastic about it all at once, encouraged by her interest. He had not changed much.
‘And did you get your scholarship?’
‘Yes. Balliol. I go up next year.’ He was being brief and modest, actually blushing. But Balliol meant nothing to her: she was thinking of his great age.
‘You must be eighteen.’
‘Yes.’
‘D’you know, I remember all your birthdays.’
As she said it she almost cried again, it seemed such a confession of long-cherished vain hope and love. He stared at her, ready to be amused, and then, seeing her face, looked away suddenly, as if he half-understood and were astonished, embarrassed, touched.
‘Oh, look at those two,’ he said quickly.
Charlie had taken off his coat, and they were holding it up as a sail. With a pang of dismay Judith realized for the first time the ominous strength of the wind. It filled the coat full, and Mariella and Charlie, bearing it high in front of them, went sailing straight across the pond. They could not stop. They shrieked in laughter and agony and went ever faster. They were borne to the pond’s edge, stubbed their skates and fell violently in a heap on the grass.
Charlie lay on his back and moaned.
‘I’ve got a pain. I’ve got a pain. Oh, Mariella! Oh, God! Oh, all you people! The anguish, thesensation!—like the Scenic Railway—transports of horror and bliss. I thought: Never,nevershall we stop. We went faster, and fas.... Oh, Mariella, yourface.... I shalldie....’
He writhed with laughter, the tears poured down his face. ‘I t-triedto say:dropthe c—— I hadn’t anyvoice—Oh, what afeeling!... those skimming dreams.... O God!’
He shut his eyes exhausted.
Then soon he had to try again. Then they all tried, and were a nuisance to the other skaters. Every one looked at Charlie, and nobody was annoyed because of his beauty and radiant spirits, and his charming apologies when he got in the way.
Judith ached with giggling; even Mariella and Julian were wiping their eyes. Charlie was so excited that he looked quite feverish. In his enthusiasm he threw his arms wide and cried:
‘Oh, darlings!’—and Judith was thrilled because she felt herself included in the endearment.
‘You know,’ said Julian, ‘you’ll be sick to-night, Charlie, if you go on like this.’