Uncle Henry was at first inclined to be angry when Peter appeared for the second time a banished man. Peter wisely forebore trying to explain the motive of his riot.
"The fact is, Uncle, I have had enough of Oxford," he said.
"Oxford seems to have had enough of you," his uncle grumbled. "I told you to get education."
"There isn't any education at Oxford. It's in London now."
"What will you do in London?"
"I could read for the bar," Peter suggested.
"Alone in London, eh? I don't think so. You want a nursemaid."
"Let the mater come and keep house."
Uncle Henry reflected. "Peter," he said, "keep out of the police court. I draw the line at that."
"I shall be all right in London. Oxford annoyed me, Uncle."
"Very well. I leave it to your mother."
Peter's mother agreed to come to London and manage a small flat.
"I shall just love to have you, mother," Peter said to her when the plans were laid.
"I wonder?" she said, searching his face.
"You're not worried about this Oxford mess?"
"I'm thinking, Peter. You're so terribly impatient."
Peter himself hunted out the flat and furnished it.
"Let him handle a bit of money," his uncle suggested.
Incidentally Peter learned something about the housing of people in London; something, too, of agents and speculators in housing. Finally he perched in Golder's Green in a small flat over a group of shops. The agent assured him it was a district loved by literary and artistic people.
His mother quickly followed him to London with plate and linen. A maid was engaged, and Peter settled down to happiness and comfort.
His first sensations were triumphant. He kicked his heels. The grey walls of Oxford fell away. He tramped the streets of London, and flung out the chest of a free man. Moreover, he had the zest of his new employment. He broke his young brains against the subtleties of the law.
Within a few weeks he began tentatively to know the intellectual firebrands of the time. He had sent his pamphlet concerningGingerbread Fairto the distinguished author whose epistolary acquaintance he had made in Hamingburgh. The great man, who independently had heard the full story of Peter's assault upon the Lord Chamberlain's stage at Oxford, was tickled, and sent himan introduction to a famous collectivist pair whose salon included everybody in London who had a theory and believed in it.
Peter met Georgian poets, independent critics and reviewers, mystics of every degree, diagrammatic and futurist painters, musicians who wrote in pentametric scales, social reformers, suspected dramatists—everybody who had proved anything, or destroyed anything, or knew how the world should be run; experts upon constitutional government in the Far East, upon beautiful conduct in garden cities, upon the incidence of taxation, upon housing and sanitation, upon sweated labour, upon sex and marriage, upon vaccination and physical culture, upon food-bases, oriental religion and Hindu poetry.
Peter did not meet all these people at once. There was a period of six months during which he gradually intruded among these jarring intelligencies. During this time he was continually seeing things from a new angle and weighing fresh opinions, continually pricked to explore untrodden ways of speculation. The chase of exotic views was for a time fun enough to keep him from measuring their value.
Peter for nearly eighteen months mingled with this fussy and bitter under-world of thinkers and talkers. He listened seriously to all it had to say, at first with respect and curiosity. But gradually he grew suspicious—even hostile. As he knew these people better, and talked with them moreintimately, he discovered that their energy was much of it superficial. When, in his lust for truth, he pushed into their defences, he found that many of their views were fashionable hearsay. They echoed one another. Only a few had deeply read or widely observed for themselves. Each clique had its registered commonplaces. Each was a nest of authority. Peter suffered a series of small shocks, hardly felt individually, but insensibly breaking down his faith. Often as he pushed into the mind of this person or that, thrilling to meet and clash with a pliable intelligence, he found himself vainly beating against the logical blank wall of a formula.
Among Peter's new acquaintances was the editor of a collectivist weekly Review. This man discovered Peter's literary gift and turned him loose upon the theatres. For several months Peter wrote weekly articles, with liberty to say what he pleased. Peter said what he pleased with ferocity. His articles were a weekly battery, trained upon the amusements of modern London. All went well till Peter began to quarrel with the intellectual drama of his editor. One week Peter grew bitter concerning a new stage hero of the time—the man of ideas who talks everybody down. Peter said flatly that he was tired of this fidgety puppet. It was time he was put away. The editor sent for him.
"Here, Paragon, this won't do at all."
"What's wrong?"
"You've dropped on this fellow like a sand-bag. We're here to encourage this sort of drama."
Peter put his nose into the air.
"What is the name of this paper? I thought you called it theFree Lance."
"You can say what you like about plays in general."
Peter then and there resigned. But he was too good a pen to lose. His editor borrowed a gallery ticket from a London daily paper, and sent Peter to attend debates in the House of Commons as an impartial critic of Parliamentary deportment and intelligence. Three weeks shattered all Peter's fixed ideas of English public life. He forgot to detest the futility of the party game—as he had at the Oxford Union so persistently contrived to do—in sincere enjoyment of a perpetually interesting comedy. Moreover, the figures he most admired were the figures he should by rote have denounced. He delighted in the perfect address of a statesman he had formerly reprobated as an old-fashioned Liberal; and, listening to the speeches of the old-fashioned Liberal's principal Tory opponent, he felt he was in contact with a living and adventurous mind. Peter recognised that this man—hitherto simply regarded as an enemy of the people—was, like himself, an explorer. He was feeling his way to the truth.
Peter stood one evening in early March—it was his second spring in London—upon the terrace at Westminster. The friendly member who had brought him there had for a moment disappeared. Perhaps it was the first stirring of the year, or the air blowing up from the sea after the fumes of the stuffiest room in London, but Peter felt a glad release as he watched the tide sweeping in from the bridge. He had just heard the speech of a socialist minister reflecting just that intellectual rigidity from which he was beginning to recoil. The day was warm, with faint ashes of a sunset dispersed over a sky of intense blue. Peter watched a boat steaming out into a world so wide that it dwarfed the towers under which he had that afternoon been sitting. Dead phrases lingered in his brain, prompting into memory a multitude of doctrines and ideas—the stuff on which he had fed since he set out to explore revolutionary London. He shot them impatiently at the open sky. They rattled against the impenetrable blue like peas flung at a window. Peter impulsively breathed deeply of the flowing air. It rushed into the corners of his brain.
He left the House, and walked towards Charing Cross. He fitfully turned over in his mindpassages of the speech he had heard that afternoon, but repeatedly the windy heavens rebuked him. He began to feel as if, with adventures all about him, he had for days been prying into a heap of rubbish.
He pulled up on the pavement beside a great horse straining to start a heavy dray. Sparks flew from his iron hoofs, which, in a desperate clatter, marked the rhythm of his effort. The muscles of his flank were contracted. His whole form was alive with energy. The dray started and moved away.
Elfinly there intruded upon Peter, watching the struggle of this beautiful creature, a memory of the ministerial orator. The one seemed grotesquely to outface the other. The straining thews of the horse were in tune with the sky. The breath in his nostrils was that same air from the sea which had met Peter upon the terrace. Nature was knit in a friendly vitality, mysteriously opposed to all the categories. The categories were somehow mystically shattered beneath the iron of the horse's beating hoofs; were shredded by the wind which noisily fluttered Peter's coat.
That same evening he attended a fashionable lecture, wherein it was explained that marriage was an affair of State. The theme touched in Peter a strain of feeling that had slept from the moment he had lost Miranda. When the lecturer had shown how the erotic forces now loose in the world, and acting blindly, could be successfullyrun in leash by a committee of experts, Peter left the meeting and sat in a restaurant waiting for dinner. The place was gay with tongues. The tongues were German and French, or English that clearly was not natural; for this was a dining place of men who paid the bill for women they had not met before. The company was very select; and Peter, devouring an expensive meal, admired with the shyness that beauty still raised in him, the clothes, faces, and obvious charms of the lovely feeders. Sometimes his heart beat a little faster as the insolent, slow eyes of one of these women curiously surveyed him. There was a beautiful creature who especially fascinated him. He felt he would like just to look at her, and enjoy the play of her face. He could not do as he wished, because now and then she glanced at him, and he would not have met her eyes for the world. Once, however, there was a clashing of their looks, and Peter felt that his cheeks were burning.
Tumultuously rebuking his pulse, Peter caught an ironic vision of himself leading a long file of these brilliant women to the lecturer from whom he had just escaped, with a request that he should deal with them according to his theory of erotic forces.
May was drawing to an end when Peter's mother decided she must spend a few weeks with her brother in Hamingburgh. Peter realised, as she told him of this, how quietly necessary she had been to him during these last months. Alwayshe returned to the still, beautiful figure of his mother as to something rooted and safe. Sometimes, as he entertained some of his talking friends, he watched her sitting monumentally wise, passively confounding them.
"I won't stay alone in London," Peter suddenly announced.
His mother calmly considered him.
"I can easily arrange it for you," she suggested at last.
"I should go mad," said Peter briefly. He crossed to where his mother was sitting.
"Why, Peter," she said, "I hardly see anything of you."
"You are always there," said Peter, putting his arm around her shoulder. "You simply don't know what a comfort it is to have you. Somehow you keep things from going to the devil. I don't mean the housekeeping," continued Peter, answering his mother's puzzled look. "The fact is, mother, you're quite wonderful. You're the only person I know who hasn't any opinions. You justare."
Peter decided to go into the country, and return to London when his mother was ready to come back. The time for this had almost arrived, when he met Marbury in the lobby of the House of Commons.
Marbury broke away from his friends as Peter was hesitating whether to pass him.
"Hullo, Peter, what are you doing in this dustyplace? I thought you were loose in the theatre."
"Was," Peter briefly corrected.
"Then you got tired?"
"No, I squabbled with the editor."
"How are you getting on?" asked Marbury, quietly inspecting his friend.
"Very badly. How are you?"
"I'm standing in a month or so for the family seat," answered Marbury. "That's why I'm here. You must come and see the election. Politics from within."
"Damn politics."
"I'll tell you what it is, Peter. It's the Spring."
"I want to get away from all this infernal talking," said Peter.
"You've discovered that some of it's a bit thin?"
"I'll tell you what I've discovered," said Peter savagely, "I've discovered that almost any damn fool can be intellectual."
"Try the stupid fellows who are always right."
"Who are they?"
"Latest definition of a Tory. Come and talk to the farm-labourers."
"Not yet. I'm going to live in the air."
"What will you do? Books?"
"I hate books."
"Come now, Peter, not all books," protested Marbury. "Let me send you some. Books for the open."
"Can you find me a book that has nothing todo with any modern thing—a book that goes with the earth and touches bottom."
"What's wrong with Shakespeare?" asked Marbury.
"I've packed Shakespeare."
"I'll send you some more."
"Be careful," Peter warned him; "I shall pitch anything that looks like a talking book into the fire."
"You mustn't do that, Peter. The books I am going to send you are valuable."
They were walking now in Whitehall.
"When do you begin to be elected?" asked Peter, suddenly expanding.
"Almost at once. I'll send for you when the time comes."
"What's the idea of that?"
"You must come round the constituency—fifty miles across in its narrowest part. I want someone to feed me with sandwiches and keep my spirits up. Besides it will do you good. You'll meet some people who have never written a book and haven't any opinions."
"Beasts of the field," said Peter.
"Not at all. They're all on the register; and they will vote for Marbury."
By the time they had reached Charing Cross Marbury had persuaded Peter to tell his address. He also agreed to join Marbury immediately he was summoned. The next day he went with his mother to Hamingburgh, and afterwards packedfor the country. He would wander aimlessly in Worcestershire from village to village till Marbury sent for him.
Already he was happier for the meeting. He felt an access of real affection for Marbury on being interrupted in his packing by the arrival of the books Marbury had promised. He pitched them unopened into his trunk, in confidence that Marbury had chosen well.
Peter finally quartered himself upon a lonely farm in Worcestershire. The estate was large and wild, running down steep hills and banks to a brook and tiny falls of water. The family who owned it scraped a livelihood from odds and ends of country employment. They had some orchard, and pasture for half a dozen cows. But there was no arable, and they made up a yearly deficit by receiving visitors from the town.
Peter had the place to himself, and the peace of it was deeply refreshing. The house stood high, whence the shapely hills of the country were visible—Malvern hanging like a small cloud on the horizon. For many days he lay in the June sun, listening to the stir of leaves, watching with curiosity the lives of small creatures he could not name. In deepest luxury he sat day by day on a fallen trunk across the stream, grateful after the blazing descent of a broken hill for the cool shade of trees meeting overhead, watching a fish lying under the bank or rising to snap at a fly. Or he would be buried in grass, softly topped by the light wind, diverted after long, empty moments by the appearance of a rabbit or a bird not suspecting him. Peter dreamed away whole days, utterly vacant of thought, recording things. He countedthe number of times a glossy black cow, munching beside him, masticated her food between each return of the cud. There was a horse which had brought his trunk to the house who always stood with his head thrust through a gap in the hedge. Peter watched the flies collect upon his eyelids, and waited lazily for the blink which regularly dispersed them in a tiny cloud. Peter, in reaction from the fruitless activity of his last months in London, rested and was pleased. It seemed as he lay upon the earth that the scent of the grass was life enough; that reality, humming in wings of the air, in the splashing of water, in noises of the cattle, was sufficient for his uninquiring day. He took an enormous pleasure in small material things—the spiriting of warm milk into the pail; the breath of an old dog as he stood, watchful and erect, in the cold morning; the slow, graceful sweeping of a scythe; the shining of the first star after sunset; the clipping of hot fingers into the brook; the odour of ham frizzling in the farmer's pan.
At night, with the curtains drawn, and by the light of an oil lamp whose smell was ever after associated in Peter's mind with these rustic days, he played with the books which Marbury had packed for him. Among them was Burton'sArabian Nightsand Urquhart'sRabelais. Marbury had well chosen. Peter had never felt before the wonder ofRabelais. Here, alone with the beasts and with people whose lives were takenup with their feeding and breeding, Peter smelt inRabelaisthe fresh dirt and sweat of the earth. He squarely received between his shoulders the hearty slap of a laughter broad as mankind.Rabelaiswas the evening chorus of his day in the fields. The voices of the hearty morning, the slow noon, and the quiet evening sounded between the lines where Grangousier warmed his great bulk by the fire and Gargantua thrived to enormous manhood.
It was only after many days that Peter looked into Burton. He wondered why Marbury should have included a book he knew only as a series of pretty tales. Then he found that beside hisRabelaisupon the shelf was the greatest song of the flesh yet uttered.
After his first night with Burton, Peter flung wide his window to the air. A cat slunk cautiously into the garden and away. The farmer and his wife came out for a moment to read the sky, and stood in the light of the door. The old man lifted his face, and was moulded clearly in silhouette—a face beaten hard with weather, but untroubled after seventy years of appetites healthily satisfied. He was sagacious as befitted his high species; he had eaten and drunk for sixty-five years, and had bred of his kind. All this he had inevitably done as a creature with his spade in the earth and his hand heavy upon the inferior beasts.
Mere flesh and blood was good, and it endured.Peter's heart was pulsing now with a song older than an English farmer—a song of man who was tickled under an Eastern sun and laughed, who was pricked with absolute lust—who found his flesh not an obstacle between himself and heaven, but his heritage and expression.
Peter was not thinking. He idly looked and received a faint rain of impressions from the still night and from memories of a tale. A barrier of fresh earth mounted between him and his troubles of the year. He was content to rest and dream. He turned from the window, weary with air and sun, stretching his elbows in an agreeable yawn. He felt the clean flexion of the muscles of his arm. He stretched again, repeating a healthy pleasure, and yawned happily to bed.
Haymaking under a burning sun began on the following day, and Peter offered help to the farmer. The old man looked favourably at Peter's broad shoulders and friendly eyes. Then there were long back-breaking hours in the open field. Peter learned why there was leisure and grace in the movements of his companion, and tried to imitate, under pleasant chaff, the expert's artful economy of power.
Peter soon found in his new friend a surprising fund of wisdom painfully gathered. The farmer's knowledge was limited, but very sure. He had learned life for himself, with scraps inherited from his father and collected from his friends. His prejudices, even when absurd, were rooted inthe earth. Peter felt he would exchange all his books for a blank mind where Nature could write in so firm a hand.
His wife brought cider and cheese to them in the field, and they sat under a hedge contemplating the morning's work in the pauses of a rough meal.
"Plenty to do yet," said Peter, looking at the large field with a sense of labour to come.
"Matter o' twenty-four hours."
The old man paused on the rim of his mug, and narrowed his eyes at the blue sky. "We can be gentle with the work. You'll find it pays to be gentle."
Peter drank gratefully at the cool cider.
"Thirsty, sir?" The old man filled Peter's mug and watched him drink it.
"That's good liquor. Forty years she's brewed it." He jerked his thumb towards the house.
"Your wife?" asked Peter most politely.
"Married forty years," nodded the old man. "It's well to marry when you're lusty. Nature's kind when you live natural, but, if you thwart her, she turns you a beast in the end. Married yourself?" he suddenly asked, surveying Peter as a likely young animal.
"I'm only twenty-one," said Peter, with a shocked inflexion.
"Not too young for marriage," grossly chuckled the old man. "There's many uneasy lads of your age and less would do well to be married. The devil tickles finely the members of a young lad."
Peter had heard these things discussed in a public hall, but the language had been decently scientific or medical. How vulgar and timid seemed these late evasions under the burning sun! Peter was ashamed not to be able frankly to meet an old man who talked clearly of nature without picking his words.
Peter sweated through the day, and in the evening sat happily tired at the window. His day's work had brought him nearer yet to the earth. The faint smell of the drying grass, and a dim line of the field where the green blade met the grey, was witness of a day well spent. Manual labour was delightful after lounging weeks of mental work with nothing to show. There was something ultimate and real about physical expenditure. Could anything in the world be finer than to be just a very sagacious animal?
A low, gurgling song—it seemed the voice of a woman—came and went among the trees of the garden. Then there was silence. Soon there were footsteps, and two figures appeared in the shadow of some bushes beside the gate which gave upon the lawn beneath him. The figures stood close, and a man's voice, pleading, alternated with low laughter in the tone which previously had been the tone of the song. At last the man moved forward, and the woman, still laughing, allowed herself to be kissed. As Peter drew instinctively back he heard her laughter muted by the man'slips. The incident stirred Peter more than he cared to acknowledge. He heard his heart beating, and saw his hand tremble on the sill.
He angrily shut the window, and, lighting the lamps, took down his books from the shelf. But the books would not hold his brain. The stifled laugh of the woman by the gate echoed there. He caught himself staring at the page, restless, feeling that the room oppressed him. It seemed that life was beating at the window, that the room in which he sat was unvisited, and that he was holding the visitor at bay.
He gave up all pretence of reading, and again let in the air. He stared into the garden, which now seemed the heart of the world. The figures by the gate had vanished, but Peter fancied he heard, from the dark, whiffs of talk, and breathing movements.
At last there were steps unmistakable, and the same low song Peter had first heard. This time the woman was alone. She carried a hat in her hand. She stood by the gate a moment, and pushed the pins into her hair. Then she came over the lawn into the light of the house window, walking free and lithe. She paused at the window and looked mischievously in upon the old couple below. Clearly she had come to surprise them. She opened the door upon them in a gleam of sly excitement. Peter saw with a renewed beating of the heart how full were the smiling lips he hadheard stifled into silence. His mind threw back the girl, as she stood in the light, into the shadow of a man's embrace.
A clamour of greeting from below scattered his thoughts.
"Why, if it isn't Bess!" he heard the old man say. Then there was a hearty kissing, and the door was shut on a murmur of welcoming talk.
Peter lay long into the night, listening to the clatter of tongues over a meal below. Bess was clearly a favourite. When the kitchen door opened, and the family tramped to bed, he heard once more the low vibrating voice of the girl.
"Good night, grandpa!"
Then he heard the women above him in the attic, making up a bed. One of them came down, and the house dropped into silence save for the quiet movements of the girl upstairs.
Peter in the morning was early awake. He had asked the day before, as a fledged labourer, to take his breakfast with the farmer that they might begin early with the hay. He felt shy of the girl whose appearance had so disconcerted him the night before. But there was no one in the kitchen except the old man and his wife.
"You heard us in the night, I reckon?" said the old man over his mug of tea.
"You had a visitor?"
"My son's first daughter. Come to lend a hand with the work. She's strong in the field—strong as a good man. You'll make a good pair," chuckled the old man. "We'll finish the ten acre to-day."
"I'll have the start, anyway," said Peter, affectedly covering his tremors. He did not relish the idea of being second labourer to a girl who already had made him nervous.
The old man laughed in the unending way of people who enjoy one joke a day, but enjoy it well.
"You'll not get the start o' Bess," he said at last. "She's milked this half-hour, and she'll a' dug taters for a week 'fore we're sweated."
They left the house and worked silently through the first half of the morning. Peter was silent,preoccupied with his strange terror of meeting the farmer's granddaughter. Yet, as they rested at noon, he was disappointed that she had not come. He had not found content in his labour.
Then, suddenly, he saw her coming over the field with a tray. At once he felt a panic to run or to disappear. He could feel his flesh burning beneath the sweat of his morning's work. He could not look directly at the girl, but in swift glances he embraced the swing and poise of her advance.
For a miserable moment Peter stood between his terror of the girl and his instinct to run and relieve her of the heavy tray. He felt himself—it seemed after hours of indecision that he did so—spring to his feet. He met her ten yards from the spot where they had sheltered under the hedge.
"Let me," he said, taking the tray into his hands. He did not look at her, but knew she was smiling at his strange, polite way.
"The young gentleman's in a mighty hurry to know you, Bess," said the farmer, amused at Peter's incredibly gallant behaviour.
"He's a young gentleman, to be sure," said the girl in the low, even note which again stirred Peter to the bone. He felt her eyes surveying him, and in an agony of resolution looked her in the face.
He could only endure for a moment her steady, impudent gaze. Her lazy smile accented the challenge of her eyes. Peter was conscious only of her sex, and she knew it at their first meeting. Inevery look and motion of her face and body was provocation. Her appeal was not always conscious, but it was never silent. Peter saw now what had moved him as she stood in the light of the window the evening before with mischief in her eyes. Even then, though she had no thought of a lover, it was woman's mischief. He saw it now fronting him in the sun. He could hardly endure to meet it, yet it was vital and sweet.
They sat and talked of the work before them.
"You've come in good time, Bess. 'Twill be a storm before the week ends, and we must get the ten acre carried."
She sat calmly munching bread and cheese, waiting to catch Peter in one of his stealthy glances.
"Yes, grandpa, I've come in good time. Perhaps I knew you had a handsome young labourer."
How could she play among the messages that quickened in their eyes?
Peter angrily flushed, and she laughed. The old man chuckled, seeing nothing at all. He was not a part of their quick life.
The old man scythed steadily through the afternoon. Peter and the girl tossed the long ranks of hay, working alternate rows. He was never for a moment unaware of her presence. Starting from the extreme ends of the field, they regularly met in the centre. As the distance between them vanished, Peter became painfully excited, almost terrified. Though he seldom looked towards thegirl, he somehow followed every swing of her brown arms. She invariably stopped her work as he approached, and Peter felt like a young animal whose points are numbered in the ring. He passed her three times, doggedly refusing to notice her. At the fourth encounter he shot at her a shyly resentful—almost sullen—protest. But the eyes he encountered were fixed on the strong muscles of his neck with a look—almost of greed—which staggered him. She knew he had read her, and she laughed as, in a tumult of pleasure, stung with shame, he turned swiftly away.
"Good boy," she murmured under her breath. Peter angrily turned towards her, and found her eyes, lit with mockery, openly seducing him.
"What do you mean?" said Peter foolishly.
"You're working fine, but you're not used to it."
"I'm all right."
"You're dripping with heat." She dropped her fork, and caught at her apron. It was a pretty apron, decorated with cherry-coloured ribbons.
"Come here," she said.
Peter stared at her like a fascinated rabbit. She stepped towards him, and wiped the running sweat from his face and neck. He pettishly shook himself free. Laughing, she stood back and admired him. Then, with a little shrug, she turned away and went slowly down the field. Peter watched her for a moment, troubled but hopelessly caught in the ease and grace of her swinging arms.Her face, as she came to him, had seemed as delicately cool as when first she appeared from the house, though a fine dew had glistened in the curves of her throat. She was lovely and strong; yet Peter had for her a faint, persistent horror.
He felt when evening came, and the field was mown, a glad release, curiously dashed with regret. His room had about it the atmosphere of a sanctuary. He was grateful for the peace it held, yet it was also desolate. After supper he sat at the window, watching the hills fade into a violet sky. As the light softened he heard once again a low song from the orchard. Peter's heart started like a spurred horse. The song continued—the faint crooning, as it were, of a thoughtful bird—and at last it became intolerable. Peter shut down his window and opened a book upon the table near him. It was a volume of Burton left from last evening. It fell open easily at a page; and, as Peter lifted it in the dim light, he read the title of a frank and merry tale concerning the way of a woman with a boy less willing than she. Peter suddenly dashed down the book as though he had been stung. Flouting his eyes between the leaves of this tale was a fragment of cherry-coloured ribbon.
He went from the house into the warm air, and flung himself down on the cut grass. He felt as if he were being hunted. In vain he avoided the image of the girl who had challenged him. He shut his eyes, and she again stood clearlybefore him in the hot sun. He buried his ears in the cool grass, and he heard her low singing. Then, in a sudden surrender, he suppressed his shy terror, and in fancy looked at her as in the flesh he had not dared to look, tracing between himself and the sky the outline of her lips and throat.
How sultry it was, and still! The air was waiting oppressively for a storm. Peter felt himself in tune with the hanging thunder. He felt he would like to hear the running water of the brook. The pearly wreck of a sunset lighted him down the hill, and soon he was sitting in a chosen nook of the river, his ears refreshed by small noises of the stream.
The silence was deep, for there was not a breath in the valley. The trees seemed to be mildly brooding—sentient sad creatures waiting for the air. Once Peter heard the bracken stir; but the silence closed again over the faint sound, leaving the world waiting as for a signal.
It seemed as if Nature was standing there bidding the earth be still till the creature she had vowed to subdue was beaten down. Peter flung his thoughts to the blank silence of the place, and they returned, reverberating and enforced.
Suddenly a shot shivered the silence into quick echoes. Peter guessed the farmer was in the warren after rabbits. Thinking to meet him and get away from the intolerable obsession of the day, he started to climb the hill. The second shot rang out surprisingly near, and almost immediately afigure rose from a bush among the bracken. It was the farmer's granddaughter. He cried out in surprise, and the figure turned.
She greeted him with an inquiring lilt of the voice. Peter came awkwardly forward.
"Did you hit?" he asked, for talking's sake.
"Two."
She leaned on the gate, hatefully smiling at him. Peter felt he must turn and run from her eyes, or that he must answer them.
He moved quickly towards her, but she did not stir. He gripped her by the arm, looked deliberately into her face, then bent and kissed her. She remained quite still, seeming merely to wait and to suffer. She neither retreated nor responded. Passion died utterly in Peter at the touch of her smiling lips. He stood away from her, brutal and chill.
"You asked me to do that," he said.
Still she smiled, betraying no sign that anything had occurred.
"You must help me to find the rabbits," she said, looking away at last towards the warren. "We're losing the light."
There was a suspicion of the fine lady in her manner, assumed to deride him. They hunted among the bracken. Peter found the dead rabbits, and they moved silently up the hill. At the garden gate they paused while he handed over his burden. Her face still kept the maddening expression of the moment when he had kissed her. But Peter'seyes now blazed back at her in wrath, and her look changed to one of slyly affected terror.
"Are you going to kiss me again?" she asked.
"Not here," Peter roughly answered. "This is where you sing. I saw you here yesterday evening."
A look of angry suspicion flashed into her eyes and passed.
"Men are very rude and sudden," she said.
"Why do you sing in the dark?"
"I sing for company," she answered.
She passed through the gate; then turned, for a moment, hesitating:
"You don't tell tales?" she abruptly asked.
"No."
"The man you saw last night," she suggested.
"I did not see him."
"He will not come again. Not yet."
"It is nothing to me," said Peter indifferently.
"Indeed?" she retorted. "I thought you asked why I sing in the dark."
Peter kept his eyes sullenly fixed on the ground, making no answer.
She shut the gate.
"Do you really want to know why I sing in the dark?"
Peter's silence covered a wish to kill this creature. There was a long silence; and when at last he looked up, her eyes were again mischievously playing him. On meeting his look of resentment and dislike, she inconsequently asked:
"Have you found a piece of cherry-coloured ribbon?"
Peter flung up his hands, and turned away into the garden. She had no need to see that he was cursing her in the shelter of the trees. She went towards the house crooning the song which was now intolerable to Peter.
It was arranged next morning at breakfast that Peter should work in the field with the farmer, and that his granddaughter should clear the remains of last year's crop of hay from the site of the stack into the loft. Peter was grateful for this division of their work; yet, again, he was strangely disappointed. Halfway through the morning, when he had done all he could for the farmer, he sat miserably in the shadow of the hedge, fighting a blind impulse to look for the girl whose presence he detested. Surely the hot sun was burning into his brain. He went towards the house, meeting on his way the farmer's wife.
"I wonder if you'd tell Bess there's lunch waiting to be taken. I daren't leave the butter this half-hour."
"Where shall I find her?" Peter asked.
"She's in the loft, to be sure."
Peter went slowly to the yard. He seemed to be two men—one lured by the echo of a song, the other hanging upon his feet, unwilling that he should move.
The last of the stack had disappeared into the loft, wisps of hay lying in a trail from the foot of the ladder. The yard was empty.
Peter paused at the ladder's foot. Then began slowly to climb.
She was resting in a far corner, and he did not see her till he had stepped from the ladder. Then he found himself looking down at her stretched at length upon piles of sweet hay. She had fallen asleep easily as a cat, and, unconscious of her pose, was freely beautiful. Her loveliness caught at Peter. Could she but lie asleep for ever, he could for ever watch. Sleep had smoothed from her features the impudent knowledge of her power. Her beauty now lay softly upon her, held in the pure curves of her throat.
Peter leaned breathlessly towards her, filling his eyes. Had he really feared this magic? Such loveliness as this his soul had caught at in scattered dreams, and now it fronted him, and he had feared to take it. Surely he had fancied that the smile of her perfect mouth was hateful, that her eyes, so beautifully lidded, had in their pride and gluttony dismayed him.
Peter dropped softly beside her. She seemed too like a fairy to be rudely touched. He delicately brushed her lips in a kiss scarcely to be felt. She started and sat upright, alert in every fibre.
Peter saw again the creature who had troubled him. He was looking into greedy pools where her lids had seemed as curtains to hide an intolerable purity.
"You kissed me?"
"It was not you," Peter muttered.
"Funny boy! How long have you been here?"
"I have come to say that lunch is waiting."
"Peter." She sang the name in her low voice, as though she were trying the sound of it.
"You kissed me, Peter. Tell me. How do I look, asleep?"
Peter closed his eyes.
"You are beautiful."
"Even you can see that," she flashed.
Peter felt she was profaning her loveliness. He kept his eyes painfully closed. She looked at him, partly in anger, partly in contempt.
"Good boy. So very good," she murmured.
As he opened his eyes, she dropped lightly towards him. In a flash she had taken his neck between her hands, and he felt her lips and teeth upon the muscles of his neck, where her eyes had rested when first he had read them.
Then she nestled there with a little purr.
Peter broke roughly away, and she laughed.
"Good boy." She mocked him again from the ladder as she went down.
Peter waited with clenched hands till the trembling of the ladder had ceased. Then he looked into the yard. She had not yet disappeared. A young farmer had ridden into the drive, and was talking to her from his horse. She seemed to be deprecating his anger. They paused in their talk as Peter drew near them. The man was good-looking, with honest eyes. But he looked at Peter with angry suspicion, carefullysearching his face, as though he desired to remember him if they should meet again.
That afternoon Peter left the farm and walked into the country. Thunder echoed among the hills, seeming the voice of his trouble. He was humiliated by the lure of a woman he disliked and feared. He vehemently told himself that he would break away. But he continually felt the strong tug of her sex. He shook under the pressure of her mouth, his neck yet bitten with that strange caress. He shunned the memory, yet returned to it, thrilling with an excitement, sweet even as it stung him.
The thunder waited among the hills all that day. As the evening wore, and Peter, back at the farm, watched the summer lightning come and go, it seemed as though batteries were closing in from all points of the heaven. But the sky was still open to the stars, and there was no rain.
Peter stood with the farmer by the garden gate. He told Peter that the little hill where they united was mysteriously immune, in a tempest, from the water which deluged the valley.
As Peter, with his thoughts full of the farmer's granddaughter, listened to the farmer's tale of a dry storm which, with never a spot of rain, had fired the stack in the yard, it seemed as though, now and then, he could hear her low singing. It floated on the heavy air. Peter could scarcely tell whether it were really her voice or an echo inhis tired brain. He strained his ears, between the pauses of the farmer's talk. The low note swelled and died.
The farmer moved into the house, and Peter could more connectedly listen. Now he heard it clearly, a faint persistent singing, implacably fascinating. To find that voice was above all things to be desired.
Peter listened, faint at heart with a struggle which suddenly seemed foolish. Pleasure caught at him. He saw her beautiful, as when she slept, the low notes of her voice breathed from lips that were neither mocking nor cruel. Her hands again crept upon his throat, and he did not draw away. He needed them.
Where should he find her? Peter went like a young animal, tracking through the dark. He paused, quietly alert; as he discovered that her murmuring came from the loft where he had found her sleeping. He climbed the ladder, and stepped into the darkness. The singing stopped, and he stood still while his eyes measured the place. At last he saw her almost at his feet. He dropped beside her without a word. She did not stir, but said as softly as though she feared to frighten him away:
"So you have come to me?"
Her voice was very gentle. It was the voice of the woman who had slept.
Peter could descry her now, half sitting againstthe hay. He perceived only the curve of her face and neck beautifully poised above him, for he had fallen at her feet.
"I cannot see you," she said. "Are you still afraid and angry?"
She stooped over him, trying to read his face. She was very quiet. Her voice parted the still air as placidly as a dropped stone makes eddies in the water.
It seemed to offer him an endless comfort.
"I had to come to you," he whispered.
She gathered him into her arms, and kissed him as softly as he had kissed her sleeping. Peter felt as though he were sinking. As she drew her cool hands across his forehead and took his face between them, he found her tender and compelling, and he leaned upon her bosom with the waters of pleasure closing above him.
But the girl had played too long with her passion. She had met him delicately, deliberately holding back her greed, enjoying the tumult in herself and the coming delight of throwing the barriers down. She bent to kiss Peter a second time, and Peter waited for the caress of her song made visible. But, even as she stooped, there came into her eyes a lust which the darkness covered.
Suddenly the veil was torn. A vivid flash of lightning lit her, and flickered away, snatched from cloud to cloud above them. For an instant Petersaw her eyes as she stooped to him. Then darkness blotted her out, and her mouth closed down upon him.
He struggled in her arms. She did not measure the strength of his revolt, but held him fast.
"Kiss me, Peter."
The words were hot upon his cheek.
Peter put forth his whole strength, and she staggered away from him. There was a short silence. She had fallen back from the excess of his recoil. He saw her dimly rise from among the hay.
"You beast!"
The words hissed at him in the dark. Venomous anger was in her tone, and bitter contempt.
There was a silence in which their pulses could be heard. Then she spoke again.
"Why did you come to me?"
Peter could not answer. His soul was a battlefield between forces stronger than himself. She walked to the door, and Peter stared vacantly at her going. The next moment he was alone.
"Why did you come to me?"
The question beat at Peter's brain all through the dreadful night. Scarcely had he got back to his room than the storm burst from the four quarters with incredible light and clamour. But Peter's ears were deaf and his eyes were blind. He sat at his window, but heard neither the rain rushing in the valley below, nor the intolerabledin in the sky above him where still the stars were clear.
Had he acted the green fool, or was he proved of a finer clay than he had allowed? He had drifted towards this girl to take her, obeying the blind motion of his blood. Then fiercely his whole being had revolted. He could not do this thing. Was his refusal a base fear of life? Had he denied his youth and the power of passion? He could not measure his deed. He now saw something fine, something consistent and strong in the girl he had refused. His own share of the story seemed only contemptible. It was even absurd. He had ineffectually played with forces beyond him.
Had he really thwarted and denied his nature? He asked it again and again. He had wanted the girl. He wanted her yet. But he could not take her with his whole soul. Therefore he could not take her at all. What was the meaning of this ugly riddle? Why was he monstrously drawn to a thing he could not do?
He denied with his whole soul that he lacked passion—the gift without which man is a creeping thing. His passion even now outplayed the lightning which forked and ran and fired the trees in the valley.
Thus Peter went wearily round his conduct of the last few hours, without advancing. Late in the night he packed to leave in the morning, andafterwards tried to sleep. But his tired brain trod the old circle of his thoughts—catching at his sleep with pale gleams of speculation, calling him into momentary consciousness, suffering him only briefly to forget.
In the morning he was flushed and uncertain. He shivered from time to time, though the storm had not lifted the summer heat. He had never felt so tired, and so utterly without strength or comfort.
Peter, finding the farmer and his wife at breakfast, told them he was leaving, and asked that his luggage should be taken to the station. The station was two miles from the house, and Peter started to walk. He had turned into the drive, and was passing the last of the farm buildings, when he ran upon two figures vehemently talking. Their voices troubled his miserable brooding; but he was hardly yet aware of their presence before his way was barred. He looked up from the ground and was confronted with a man visibly blazing with anger.
He looked aside for an explanation, and saw that the man had been talking with the farmer's granddaughter. She was watching them with expressionless eyes, but with a cold satisfaction hiding in the line of her mouth.
"What does this mean?" said Peter, making an attempt to pass.
He looked swiftly from one to the other, recognising his opponent as the man he had seen talking from his horse in the yard yesterday.
The man struck at Peter with his whip.
Peter caught the blow on his arm, and flung out his fists.
"What's your quarrel with me?" asked Peter.
"Well you know it," said the man.
Peter turned to the farmer's granddaughter. She smiled at him, and he understood. He was filled with a desolating sense of the futility of resisting the event.
"I've no quarrel with you," he drearily protested to the man, "why do you force it?"
"It's late to talk of forcing."
"Forcing? I don't understand."
Again Peter turned to the woman. Her metallic outfacing of his question flashed the truth at him.
"He knows that you have insulted me."
The words came from her on a low malicious note.
"Are you going to fight?" the man blazed at him, flinging his weapon to the ground. "Or are you going to take that?" He pointed to the whip lying between them.
Peter flung off his coat. Standing in the sun, he felt weak and vague. He swayed a little. He felt he must get away from the intolerable heat. He looked into the shed beside them, and the man nodded.
They went in and faced each other upon a dusty floor of uneven stone. The girl sat on Peter's coat, indecently fascinated. The man looked grimly at Peter's strong arms and professional attitude. But Peter was faint and sick. He saw his fists before him as though they belonged to another—white and blurred. Dreamily he realised that a blow had started upon him out of thegrey air. He met it with an instinctive guard; but he weakly smiled to feel something heavy and strong break through his arm like paper. Then everything was blotted out.
In a moment the man was kneeling beside him, astonished at the strange collapse of his opponent. Peter had gone down like a sack, striking his head on the stone floor. The man had hardly touched him. Indeed, he had himself nearly fallen with the impetus of a blow which had fallen upon the air.
He felt Peter's pulse and forehead, awed by his stillness and the stare of his eyes. The girl was now beside him.
"Quick," she said. "Run to the house. We must get him to bed."
The man looked at her, hard and stern.
"You're a bit too anxious," he said.
"Can't you see? The boy's dying."
He looked implacably into her eyes.
"Let the blackguard lie."
"Fool!"
She almost spat at him, with a gesture of impatient agony for Peter on the floor.
"You've been lying to me," suddenly said the man.
She did not answer, but he persisted:
"You told me——"
"He did not."
He lifted his hand to strike her. She did not flinch, but said quietly:
"Who's the blackguard now?"
He turned and walked swiftly from the shed. She heard him running to the house, and took Peter's head on her lap. His lips were moving. Compassion stirred in her—a sensual compassion, feeding upon her complete possession of Peter, helplessly at her pleasure.
The man returned with the farmer's cart, and Peter was taken to the house. A telegram was sent to Hamingburgh, and the local doctor was called. He said that Peter had had a stroke of the sun. He was in a raging fever. The farmer's granddaughter was occasionally left with him.
She sat for several hours beside the bed watching Peter's restless and feeble movements. Sometimes she heard him talking vaguely and softly, but for long she could catch no syllable of what he said. Again she was stirred with delicious pity. She put her hands upon his cheeks, and leaned over his stirring lips for a long hour. Then suddenly she began to hear what he was saying, piecing his broken words.
He was walking alone in a dark house. It was very dark and quite still except for the dripping of water into a cistern. Peter always returned to this dripping water. He was looking for someone, and he stood where she used to sleep. At last a strange name came to his tongue—endlessly repeated.
The listening girl drew away from him. Shewent to the window to get beyond range of his voice. She was empty and thwarted. The name pursued her and she turned back to the bed. Maddened by his repeated murmur, she felt as if she were fighting for a place in his mind. She put her hand upon his mouth, trying to still the name upon his lips. But she felt them moving under the touch of her fingers, with the syllables that shut her out.
She dropped on her knees beside him, becoming a part of his madness.
"Here is the woman you want," she sang to him. Tears of vexation and jealousy—quick as a child's—started down her face.
"Peter, boy, don't you remember? You came to me, and dropped in the hay. I sang to you in the dark, and you came."
But Peter stood in a dark house, muttering a name she had never heard. Now he was striking matches one after another, peering into the empty corners of a deserted room. Then he spoke of an attic with rafters, and again of the dripping water.
The girl looked into his vacant eyes.
"Can't you see me, Peter?"
It was someone else he saw: he talked now of her dusty frock and of a garden where he sat and waited.
The woman by the bed could not come between him and this lovely ghost. She strained Peter towards her, and put her face to his cheek.
"No, Peter; it's me that is here. Can't you feel that I am holding you?"
Her pressure started in him another disordered memory. He struggled against her, and raised himself upon an elbow. His eyes looked quite through her. He saw her in his brain, but he did not see her in the room before him. The girl shuddered to hear him struggling with a mirage of herself. He was back in the loft. At first she thought it was the sight of her visibly before him in the room that caused him to speak of her. She drew back, and with a shudder saw he was talking to the air.
"You are not Miranda," he said, accusing the shape of his brain. "She smiled, but she did not smile like that."
The girl could no longer endure it. She went from the room, and, till Mrs. Paragon came, the farmer's wife sat beside him.
Mrs. Paragon arrived late in the afternoon. Peter could not be made to perceive her, and a physician was sent for from London.
Mrs. Paragon sat with Peter through the night, stifling her fear. His talk perplexed her in the extreme. The empty house where he wandered became as real to her as the room in which she sat. He had gone there to find Miranda, and this it was that so grieved and puzzled his mother. Peter had never once spoken of Miranda since the night he had arranged to go to London for the first time. She did not think he had of late thought of Miranda. Had he been eating his heart in secret?
The farmer's granddaughter waited upon Mrs. Paragon through the night. They talked only of his condition, but Mrs. Paragon noted her extreme interest in the patient.
Towards the morning they were together by the bedside. Peter had begun again to talk, and Mrs. Paragon suddenly saw the girl shrink away. Then almost immediately she turned and left the room.
Mrs. Paragon bent to listen. Peter was treading again the weary round of his thoughts of thepreceding day. After a few moments his mother's face became very thoughtful.
When in the morning the girl brought her some breakfast, she said to her quietly:
"How long have you been here?"
"Two days." Already the girl knew she was detected.
"What has happened to my son?"
"How am I to know better than the doctor?" she countered.
"You know very well indeed."
"He is nothing to me."
Mrs. Paragon inexorably faced her:
"How could you be so wicked?" she said in a low voice.
"What do you mean?"
"You are not surprised when I talk to you of my son, and you have been here only two days."
Peter's mother stood like marble. The girl saw she was open to be read. Her pride was broken.
"Do not send me away," she pleaded. "I must know whether he lives or dies."
"What right have you to know?"
The girl was silent, and Mrs. Paragon shivered. She hardly dared be made sure.
"Has my son belonged to you?"
"No."
The girl hated to confess it, but quickly used it as a plea:
"Now will you let me stay?" she entreated.
Mrs. Paragon turned coldly away.
"Please go," she commanded.
The girl was struck into a hopeless humility.
"I will not trouble him again," she pleaded.
"I myself shall see to that."
Mrs. Paragon spoke calmly, and did not stir. Peter lay on the bed safely in her shadow.
The girl looked her farewell at him and passed out.
The specialist from London arrived before noon. He at once took a cheerful view. After listening to the local doctor's account of Peter's night, and examining the patient himself, he relieved Mrs. Paragon of her fears.
"What's the boy been doing?" he asked, after deciding there was nothing to keep him in Worcestershire. "This might well be mistaken for a touch of the sun," he said, smiling at the local man, "but it's not quite so simple. It looks as if he'd been trying to put himself straight with things, and not quite succeeded. He's suffering from acute mental excitement, but he's a healthy youngster and his temperature's falling. He won't talk any more."
"There's a thing that rather puzzles me, doctor," Mrs. Paragon hesitated.
"Well?"
"My son has been troubled, greatly troubled, by someone here, but most of his talk was about someone else."
"I don't quite understand."
"He has talked of a girl I thought he hadforgotten. At least I did not think she had lately been in his mind."
"Very likely not, Mrs. Paragon. The mind's not at all a simple thing. Usually in cases like this the memories which come uppermost are things forgotten. We call it the subconscious self. This girl your son has been talking about—probably he does not know that he remembers her. Perhaps—of course I don't know all the circumstances—he has not thought of her for years. But evidently she is a vital memory. She is sleeping in his mind. Pardon my running on like this," the doctor concluded, smiling, "but you look interested."
"I think I understand."
"Is that all you want to know?"
"You are sure he is quite safe?"
"There's nothing to be anxious about. He only wants well nursing."
The doctor paused and looked keenly at Mrs. Paragon.
"You are very proud of him," he suggested.
"Prouder to-day than ever."
"He looks quite a splendid fellow. Send for me if anything goes seriously wrong."
Mrs. Paragon now sat happily with Peter, for he grew continually calmer, and she felt he was safe. A proud content sank deep into her heart as she put together the story of these last days. She pondered also the doctor's words, and wondered whether Peter had consciously calledMiranda to his help. Or did she lurk as a secret angel under the surface of his life?
Forty-eight hours later Peter woke from a long sleep, and found his mother beside him. He did not stir, but just accepted her. He felt too weak to talk, and, taking some food, went immediately to sleep again.
Next time he woke Mrs. Paragon was not in the room, the farmer's wife having taken charge for a moment. Peter raised himself on one elbow, wondering to feel himself so weak.
"How long have I been like this?" he asked. "I feel as if I'd been in bed for a year."
"You're all right now, lad. You've been too much in the hot sun and got a touch o' fever."
Peter looked round the room.
"Didn't I see my mother here?" he asked.
"You did, to be sure. We sent for her when you were took with the heat. It was Bess that found you, lying in the road."
Peter remembered now how and where he had fallen.
Mrs. Paragon came in at that moment, and the farmer's wife greeted her.
"The lad's awake, and talking like a Christian."
Mrs. Paragon came and kissed him, the farmer's wife softly leaving them together. Peter looked tranquilly at his mother.
"I'm afraid I've frightened you," he said at last.
"Only for a little while," she reassured him.
"What time is it? I mean, how long have you been here?"
"Only three days."
"It feels like a hundred years," said Peter. "As if it had all happened to someone else. There was a girl here, mother. Where is she now?"
"She has gone away."
Peter sank peacefully back. After a while his mother said to him:
"Have you been grieving for anyone, Peter, during these last years?"
"Grieving?" Peter was making diagrams of the cracks and stains on the ceiling.
"You've been talking, Peter."
"What have I been talking about?" he idly inquired.
"You've been talking about your troubles."
"I haven't any troubles." Peter turned from the ceiling to his mother's face, feeling how pleasant it was to see her there.
"You've been talking about someone who troubled you," Mrs. Paragon persisted.