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What John and Mary really did was to make love like vicious children; and this was due to the fact that they were both very nervous and very excitable but not in the faintest degree tempted to the usual gestures of excessive human passion. The rationalism of analytic logic has divided erotic emotion into fixed conventional types, popular opinion offering one set of categories, fashionable psychology offering another. As a matter of fact, each new encounter of two amorists creates a unique universe. No existing generalisation, whether of the wise or of the unwise, covers or ever will cover a tenth part of its thrilling phenomena. In one respect this love-making by Dye's Hole was the most childlike that the spot had ever witnessed; in another it was the most cerebral. The nervous excitement manifested by these two was so free from traditional sentimentality and normal passion, so, dominated by a certain cold-blooded and elemental lechery, that something in the fibrous interstices of the old tree against which they leaned was aroused by it and responded to it.

And so when they forsook that ledge of muddy ground between the confederate tree and the dark water, it was not only with relaxed nerves and an absolute sense of mutual understanding, it was with a dim awareness of some strange virtue having passed into them. Lingering behind the girl for a moment the man pressed his forehead against that indented willow trunk and murmured a certain favourite formula of his, relating to- his dead mother. After that, taking up his oars and boat-hook, he followed the girl along the river bank. It did not take them long now to reach Alder Dyke.

Alder Dyke! Alder Dyke! It was not marigold stalks nor the smell of dough. It was alder boughs that brought Tom Barter and that unknown ecstasy into the arteries of his soul! He made a fumbling forward movement with his arms as he touched these alders, as if welcoming a living person, and Mary divined, merely from the look of his lean vagabond's back, that some new emotion, entirely unconnected with her, had taken possession of him. When he dived into the mass of entangled boughs he plunged his hands into it and only after pressing an armful of rough twigs against his mouth and cheeks did he turn his head towards her. Any ordinary girl would have been disturbed by the nature of the crazy sound he now made to express his feelings and to summon his mate to enjoy Alder Dyke with him! It was more like the whinnying of a wild horse than anything else and yet it was not as loud as that; nor was it really an animal sound any more than it was a human sound. It was the sort of sound that this thick bed of alders itself might have emitted when tossed and rocked and torn by some fierce buffetting of the March winds. Instead of getting angry with him or thinking to herself “Who is this man I have given myself to?” instead in fact of thinking anything at all, Mary simply put down her basket, and ran hastily to his side. Without a word she threw her arms round his neck and pressed her lips against his cold leaf-smelling cheek. An alder twig had chanced to scratch his skin and the girl tasted now .the saltish taste of spilt blood. John's cap had been already switched from his head by his dive into the mass of boughs, and Mary instinctively snatched off her own hat. Thus they swayed together for a minute like two wild ponies who in joy bite furiously at each other's necks. Then, using all his strength, though she was nearly as tall as he, he lifted her up and trampling forward like a centaur with a human burden plunged headlong deeper and deeper among those twisted branches.

When he reached the banks of the deep ditch itself he turned towards its mouth, and after an angry and tender struggle to keep the twigs from striking the girl's face, emerged triumphantly at a grassy open space where the Dyke ran into the river. There lay the boat he was looking for, moored by a padlocked chain to a stake in the ground, its rudder embedded in mud, its bottom full of dark rain-water. He put the girl down and the two stood side by side staring into the boat.

“It . . . rather . . . wants . . . bailing,” gasped Mary.

John was too much out of breath to make any comment but he glanced at her with a furtive look, half shame, half pride, and his lips twitched into a wry smile.

“I'll look,” she cried, jumping into the boat. “You stay where you are for a while, John.”

He saw her pass quickly to the stern, stepping from seat to seat. Then she stooped down and began feeling about in the bottom of the boat. “Here we are!” she cried, holding up a big tin cup. “Now don't you move, John, please, till I've got some of this water out.”

He sat still, watching her, hugging his knees and his hands.

“It smells very fishy down here!” she cried. He saw her make a sudden face of disgust and scoop with her hands in the bilge-water under the stern seat. “Ugh! It's the head of an eel.” She threw something far into the river, where it sank with a splash.

“I'd sooner be an eel than a worm,” he muttered, and the soul within him sensitized by love-making flung forth an obscure prayer across the flowing stream. Over the level Norfolk pastures it went; over the wide fens and the deep dykes, until it came to the sea-banks of the North Sea. Here John's prayer left the earth altogether and shooting outward, beyond the earth's atmosphere, beyond the whole stellar system, just as if it had been an arrow shot from the Bow of Sagittarius the Centaur, reached the heart of his dead mother where she dwelt in the invisible world. “Don't let me ever compete with anyone!” his prayer said. “If I'm a worm and no man, let me enjoy my life as a worm. Let me stop showing off to anyone; even to Mary! Let me live my own life free from the opinions, good or bad, of all other people! Now that I've found Mary, let me want nothing else!”

He continued to watch his new-found mate bailing out the dark rain-water from the bottom of the boat. “This is our home,” he thought. “With the smell of Alder Dyke in our souls we'll defy Glastonbury and Philip together! Our ancestors got their bread from the fens and we'll get our bread from Glastonbury and then come home, home to Alder Dyke! We won't compete with anyone.' We'll live our own life free from them all! If we are Aldei Dyke eels, let us remain so! If we're worms of Norfolk mud let us remain so! Eels and worms can suck the breasts of life as well as any of them. What does anything matter as long ai Mary's alive and I'm alive; and we're not divided?”

“Are you feeling all right now, John? I'm not going to bai ,all day, I can tell you!”

The tone of her voice delighted him. It was an earth} tone, like the sound of a horse's hoof on springy turf. He had a peculiar sensation as if he could mount up on that tone of hers as on a flight of mossy stone steps.

Extracting the key from his pocket he now unlocked the boat and they were soon in midstream. “Don't let's row, John,'' she said. ”I'm tired and you've exhausted yourself carrying me. Let's drift with the tide!"

She seated herself in the stern and took possession of the rudder lines. John, holding the oars in the rowlocks at an upraised angle, placed himself opposite to her. Thus she steered the boat and stared gravely forward past his face; while he, balancing the blades of the oars above the water, watched every flicker of her expression, as a look-out man on a ship watches the horizon of all his hopes.

The river wTeeds, below the tide that bore them on, gleamed emerald green in the warm sunshine. Across and between the weeds darted shoals of glittering dace, their swaying bodies sometimes silver white and sometimes slippery black as they turned and twisted, rose and sank, hovered and flashed by. Beds of golden marigolds reflected their bright cups in the swift water; and here and there, against the brownish clumps of last year's reeds, they caught passing glimpses of pale, delicate-tinged cuckoo flowers. Every now and then they would come upon a group of hornless Norfolk cattle, their brown and white backs, bent heads, and noble udders giving to the whole scene an air of enchanted passivity through which the boat passed forward on its way, as if the quiet pastures and solemn cattle were the dream of some very old god into which the gleaming river and the darting fish entered by a sort of violence, as the dream of a younger and more restless immortal.

“Don't you think, Mary, that there was something rather touching about the way that young Spear hummed and hawed last night, trying to express his ideas?”

“Look out, John! Look out! Push with your left! No, the other one. . . . Damn!”

He rose to his feet and shoved the prow of the boat round a muddy promontory. “Can't you do it by steering?”

“No, I can't. Keep your oars down a bit. No! Closer to the water! Give a pull now as I tell you.”

He took his seat again and tried to obey her.

“With your left, now!” she cried. “Your left! Your left! Don't you know your left hand from your right?” She loved him for being so clumsy. She loved him for not knowing his left hand from his right. And yet these things irritated her so much that she could have boxed his ears. She would have liked to hit him. She would have liked to throw her arms round his neck and kiss him, after she had hit him!

“Don't you think it was rather pathetic, the way he talked? I didn't like him at first. I thought he was a bully. But I came round to him in the end.”

"You didn't like Cousin Percy much. I could see thatV said Mary.

He was silent for a second, frowning. Then he struck the water with the flat of one of his oars. “Only because she's in love with Philip!” he cried. “That young Spear is what you English call a decent chap and that girl is out for making him a cuckold.”

“I think Percy is sweet,” said Mary. “She can't help being attractive to men. She's attractive to you, my dear, or you wouldn't be so cross with her.”

“She's a fatal girl,” muttered John Crow.

“What did you call her?”

“Fatal. And that's what she is. She's the most dangerous type of all. If she goes down to Glastonbury there'll be the devil to pay. I could see Cousin Tilly had her eye on her . . . and Aunt Elizabeth too.”

“It's interesting you should concern yourself so much about Dave,” said Mary. “I expect he reminds you of that boy Barter,” she added.

John gazed at her in astonishment.

“What a little witch you are! God! I must be careful what thoughts cross my mind when I'm with you.”

“Now I must tell him,” Mary said to herself. “This is the moment to tell him.” It was really beginning to amount to something grotesque, this inability of hers to explain that she knew Tom Barter well and had often been to tea with him in a little tea-shop near the Pilgrims' Inn in the Glastonbury High Street.

She dropped the rudder-lines and clasped her fingers in her lap. “Row now, will you, John? And T'm not going to steer you either. I'm going to have a cigarette.”

Her instinct was always to smoke a cigarette at any serious crisis in her life. She lit one now, and out of the midst of a cloud of smoke she made the plunge. “I believe I know your friend Tom Barter,” she said. Damn! Why must her voice take that funny tone? “I believe he works in one of Philip's factories. I believe it's your friend; but of course it may not be. He's got lodgings next to the Pilgrims' Inn.”

Like an experienced fox who hears the dogs in the distance and automatically takes to the hedge, a deep self-preservative instinct in John, a male friend-preservative instinct, made him say hurriedly, “Do you really think it's the same? I don't believe it can be. Tom Barter used to go for endless long walks collecting birds' eggs. Does yours do that? If he doesn't go on long walks alone he's not the same!”

She surrounded her smooth, dark head with smoke that went trailing in spiral wisps down the water-track behind them. “I like Tom very much,” she said, scrupulously weighing her words. “There are few people down there that I like better.”

They both looked away from each other at the darkly massed woods which terminated the shining meadows on their right.

“It's the aspen poplars that give this scenery its character,” he remarked sententiously. “Those rounded masses of foliage, seen across absolutely level fields, and growing in great wild scattered clumps too; they give the whole place a park-like look; and yet it's a neglected, untidy park. Woods on flat ground look much larger and more mysterious than woods on hillsides. Don't you think so?”