Unknown (4 page)

He moved his hands from her breasts and encircled her thin neck with all his fingers. He could feel the luxury of abandonment with which her chin sank on his knuckles and her head fell sideways. She was feeling exactly as he was feeling—only, as was right and proper, the reverse way. Oh, what magical expressions for the only things in love that really counted, were those old ballad phrases. Mary was not pretty. She was not beautiful. She had what the old ballads had. Yes, that was the thing. The best love was not lust; nor was it passion. Still less was it any ideal It was pure Romance! But pure Romance was harsh and grim and stoical and a man must be grim to embrace it. Yes, it went well with cold March wind and cold rain and long chilly grass.

He released her neck and ran his fingers through her brown wavy hair. Mary always parted it in the middle and drew it back, each way. Mary's forehead always seemed fullest just over each temple where there were little blue veins. Her nose was rather long and very straight; but it had wide, flexible nostrils, the nostrils of an animal who goes by scent. John's restless fingers now began feeling over all her features, one by one, as if he had been a blind old man and she his unseen guide. It gave him a queer sensation, like touching the exposed belly of some delicate fish or bird, when he felt the pulses of her eyes beating under her tight-closed eyelids. He and she were both of them blind now. By God! And they both of them felt blind; and in the blind arms of chance. When he came to her full lips and her rather large mouth he hoped in his heart it would come upon her to bite his fingers. And she did. He drew his bitten fingers away and sucked at them dreamily. He struggled to his feet and catching her under the shoulder blades lifted her up. The feeling of her body in his hands excited his senses but he only gave her one savage hug, pressing her fiercely against him, his long bony hands gripping the front of her thighs. Then he let her go with an abruptness that almost flung her on the grass.

“It's time to see the fish if we're not going to miss the funeral,” he said.

They both picked up their sticks after that and went forward.

John Crow had forgotten how separated from the farm-house the mill-pond was. He had just begun to feel those fears of dogs and angry farmers common to all tramps and gipsies. But he was to be spared any agitation of this kind. The Mill stood by itself; and the face which it turned to the mill-pond was vacant of windows. It was a queer blind face, under its heavy East Anglian tiles. Mary and he soon found themselves leaning over the low stone parapet and staring into the huge deep pool. . . .

“It's the same!” “I remember!” “I remember!”

Their voices came simultaneously; and for one flash of a fragment of a second something in them held a wind-blown taper to a scene lost and buried more than twenty years. But from the depths of John Crow's mind another image suddenly mounted up and another memory. Tom Barter! Tom Barter! It was more than once he had come here with Tom, a boy of his own age, the son of the Squire of Didlington; but the episode came back now with an overwhelming rush. What a heap of information about fish and about fishing Tom had known! And he had got the boat up those shallows and past the dam too ... got it right into the “big river,” near Didlington bridge! John became very silent now, staring at the water and thinking of Tom. It seemed very curious, looking back at that far-off day, that there should ever have been any boy so strong, so capable, so extraordinarily nice to him as Tom Barter had been. He and Tom were exactly the same age. What had become of him?

“On* one of those days,” he announced now to Mary, “I came here with Tom Barter. Do you remember Tom, Mary? He was probably the best friend I shall ever have!”

Their four hands were pressed against the parapet, palms down, and their two heads were close together. Mary moved one of her hands a little till it just touched one of his.

“Ye . . . es, I . . . think ... I do,” she replied musingly. In her heart she said to herself, “I won't tell him now that I know him quite well and that he's working for Cousin Philip at Glastonburyf”

“Oh, you don't remember him if you don't see him clearly Vs cried John emphatically. ”Look at that big one, Mary, look at him rising there! It was that fish that brought him back to my mind. Directly I saw that big one I thought of Tom. He got the boat right up the dam that day, Mary, Tom did."

“I . . . don't . . . think ... 7 was there that day,” said Mary in a low voice. And in her heart she saw two little boys standing exactly where they two were standing at this minute. Could it have been Tom, and not her at all, that he had hugged at the bottom of the boat? Boys no doubt are often shameless on long, hot afternoons!

“Right over the dam. . • .” went on John Crow. “I can see his face now as he pulled at it. He must have taken off his stockings. The dam was all slippery with moss.”

“Damn the dam!” cried Mary in her heart. But she said quietly, “I think I remember him in church, John. He used to sit in the front pew. Or if it wasn't your friend it was a great, big, strong-looking boy with curly hair and a freckly face. Yes, I think it must have been Tom.”

“Tom hadn't freckles,” said John Crow with a faint touch of peevishness. There arose in his masculine brain an obscure annoyance with himself for having brought that boy into it at all. His vague thought, thus limned in the darkness, was that certain emotions were best kept separate! But this thought vanished as quickly as it came and both the man and the woman instinctively dropped the subject.

They dropped it without any feeling at all on his part and on hers only a faint obscure sense that she would have to Confess sooner or later that this boy was now living at Glastonbury. Then they plunged into the deep pool together now with their eyes, their minds, and their souls.

There are few mill-ponds like Harrod's in all Norfolk and the sensation which these two returning natives got from looking into its depths was unforgettable by both of them. On its outer rim the water was of a pale, neutral colour, a sort of ashen grey, but as the eye moved from circumference to centre it got darker and darker; a faint bluish tinge mingled there with the grey and there appeared a sort of mysterious luminosity as if there had been a subterranean light at the bottom of the pool.

But what a thing it was to see those great fish, one after another, rise up slowly from the unseen depths, mount to the surface as if they were going to breathe the air, and then, with a reversion of their slow ellipse, turn back towards the depths again!

To the girl this sight was purely disinterested—just objectively arresting like a flight of beautiful swallows—but to John, with his boyish memory of fishing-rods and predatory pursuit, there was a spasm of possessiveness in it, intense, disturbing, provocative, erotic. The girl satisfied no sense but that of sight as she watched these mysterious water-denizens, first sub-aqueous clouds, then vague darknesses, then noble fish-shapes, rising up and sinking down as if in the performance of some elaborate court ritual, the rules of which were as strict as in some water palace of the Oceanides! But John's grosser nature was not so easily content. A longing seized him, that seemed to carry with it some primordial phallic tremulousness, to grasp with his hands these slippery creatures, to hold them tight, to feel their fins, their scales, their sliding coolness, their electric livingness.

Making no attempt to analyse why it should have been that the sight of these alien beings, gliding upward, downward, with such intense and yet easy volition, should excite his desire, he moved instinctively behind his companion and slid his arms between her body and the rough fabric of the wall against which they leaned.

“You're like a cormorant,” she gasped when she recovered her breath" from the disturbance of his protracted embrace.

“Sorry,” he muttered. “I couldn't help it. Curse it!” he added. “We've got to go, my dear, and quickly too! So say good-bye trout, or chub, or whatever you are! / don't know what you are!”

He caught her hand and pulled her away, as if he feared she might transform herself into one of those cold, slippery fish-shapes, and vanish forever into the bluish-grey twilight. As he led her off, his last glance revealed a gleaming circle of ripples. “There's a rise!” he murmured. “The only one we've seen, but we must hurry! I daren't look at my watch.”

The tolling of the bell in the flint tower of the high-roofed Northwold church did indeed begin before they reached the first house of the village. The wind had dropped considerably and the strong sunshine, warming their bodies through all their clothes, combined with the motion of their rapid walk to throw them into a glow of delicious well-being. John felt so well satisfied with what life was offering him that his mind took a leap—unusual for him—into his practical future.

“I'm going to ask Philip to give me a job in Glastonbury,” he said.

The girl found a secret vent for the rush of rapturous delight which this nftws brought to her by clutching the flapping edges of • d pu lling them tightly round her neck.

'Tm a companion to an old woman there called Themia Drew,“ she said eagerly. ”Her house is what they call the Abbey House so I can see the Ruins from my bedroom."

“You owe your job to Philip, I suppose?” said John. “I decided before I left the rue Grimoire, that Fd ask him for a job there myself- So my English life will begin side by side with your life.”

Her voice was decidedly strained as she asked her next question. “You're not married, are you, John?”

The tolling of the bell in the flint tower fell upon them at that moment like a long, bony arm thrust out of a coffin. He uttered a sardonic chuckle.

“If I were, my dear, she'd be a funny kind of Frenchwoman not to have tricked me out better. She did buy me this tie------”

He pulled out the object referred to and flapped it between his finger and thumb as they hurried down the street. “No, no—I'm not married. And now Pve got hold of you I'm not likely to be—” he cast a foxy glance at her out of the corner of his slanted eyelids; a look such as a thievish schoolboy, with a stolen plum in his fingers, might throw upon the owner's daughter—“unless you would marry me!”

She gave him a dreamy, abstracted stare in answer, as though she had not heard his last words at all. Then she bit her lip with a little frown and turned away her head. When she looked at him again her face had cleared. “How lucky that Philip got the idea of bringing me here, John. I don't believe you'd have thought of Giastonbury if we hadn't met.”

They had now reached the entrance to the churchyard; and they found they had to push their way through a crowd of villagers to geUthrough the narrow gate. They made their way to where two clergymen were standing above a hole in the ground. The white surplices these wore fluttered a little in the wind, displaying at intervals the black trousers underneath. In front of these white figures, on the other side of the hole, all the relations were mutely assembled, the men in a sort of discreet trance, shamefacedly holding their hats, over which their heads were bowed; the women, much more self-possessed, throwing quick little glances here and there and fidgeting with the umbrellas prayer-books and handkerchiefs which they hold in their black-gloved hands. John and Mary advanced instinctively to the side of Miss Elizabeth Crow, who was the only one of the whole company to be showing any deep emotion. She was sobbing bitterly; and she held both hands, bare and empty, pressed against her face.

Quickly enough, however, when Mary reached her side, she realised who it was, and removing her hands from her face, gave her, through her falling tears and the convulsed twitching of her rugged cheeks, a sympathetic and humorous smile. Those were the only tears, that was the only smile, evoked from any human skull at the funeral of William Crow. This stalwart, stout lady, now so sturdily wiping away her tears with the back of one of her plump hands, was indeed, according to that queer destiny which the man in the New Inn had discoursed upon, the only child*of the dead man left alive. All the rest of the company were grandchildren; or they were county neighbours. “She treatea 'un pretty bad in's lifetime,” murmured one of the village onlookers. “ ?Tis too late to make a hullabaloo, now the poor man's dead.”

The service had begun some while before John and Mary appeared upon the scene; so it was not very long before it was all over and the company trooping back to the Rectory. This was an easy proceeding for the simple reason that at the side of the churchyard opposite to the public entrance there was a private door leading into a portion of the Rectory garden; and not only so, but into that very portion of it, a walled-in courtyard, which surrounded the front entrance to the house.

It was in the large, old-fashioned drawing-room, that room that had made such a deep impression on the mind of the youthful John, that all the relatives were now gathered to hear Lawyer Didlington read the will. It fell to Philip Crow to act the part of host to everybody and also the part of the natural heir to his grandfather; although, as a matter of fact, no one except the lawyer himself had more than the vaguest speculative guess as to what the will was likely to contain. But Philip had so much nervous domination that he was the sort of person who always takes the lead in any group or on any occasion of uaportaiige; nor would an outsider have guessed for a second, watching the man's youthful energy, that in a couple of days from today he would be fifty years old.

The windows opened upon an enormous lawn which hself opened out into a field surrounded by trees. In the middle of the lawn wTas a great cedar tree. The windows almost reached to the floor of the room; and thus, with the lawn and with the fiald, entirely secluded from the outer world, the drawing-room itself became the inner sanctuary of “a great good place,5”1 a consecrated Arcadia. To the right of anyone standing at these windows and looking out, rose, behind a border of laurel bushes, the high, grey, flint nave of the church. Thus this room possessed that rare delicious quality that certain old chambers come to have that overlook scholastic quadrangles or walled-in college gardens.