The Young Desire It (25 page)

When Charles opened his eyes he saw she was looking upon him still, and wondered if she had moved at all. He took his fingers from about her wrist, and for the third time, as he raised his head to lean on his hand, their eyes met, without smiling.

‘What was that?' he asked, breaking the silence with difficulty. ‘It was like a dream. I don't know what happened.'

‘Neither do I.' She answered him in the same low voice.

They looked at one another with wonder and curiosity, like strangers oft-reported who meet for the first time and see each other's face. The sunlight on them made them beautiful, and he was again almost frightened at the youth and loveliness he saw in her. Her head was averted from him, and she was looking down at her hand on the grass.

‘You held me very hard,' she said slowly. ‘Look. The marks are still there.'

When she held out her hand he took it, and saw round the wrist the white imprints where his fingers had clung to her like the insane fingers of a drowning man. Laughter at last came into his throat, and caught there and choked him. He trembled, and she saw it, as he supposed from the concern in her eyes.

‘I'm all right,' he said.

‘You're still holding my wrist.'

‘I want to, Margaret,' he said, and was glad he could use her name now, as a seal upon the community between them. ‘Let me hold it.'

She laughed briefly and released herself from his fingers. An unhappy shadow lay now in the depths of her eyes. Seeing it, he sat up and asked what was troubling her.

‘Nothing,' she said. ‘Only that I have to go now.'

‘Go?' he said loudly, and fell silent again, thinking. ‘I suppose you must. Oh yes.'

He shook his head quickly.

‘And I must, too—go to my silly books, and spend the afternoon working when I—when I…'

She smiled, and again the amazement of their alliance spoke between them.

‘You make me laugh. You speak like a very grown-up person; and yet I know you're not.'

‘I don't care,' he said.

She begged him not to speak so loudly.

‘Don't they stop you at School?'

‘I don't do it there,' he said more quietly. ‘And you listen: I don't care'—he spoke almost in a whisper—‘how old I am or not. And I have to go and work, and I want to be here and have you here to look at and talk to. Now—was that quiet enough?'

He was excited to see her blush as she looked at him.

‘I think you'd like to be here too,' he said. ‘It's a pity we can't live life as we want to.' He flung his arms wide.

‘It's so beautiful to live; but it seems difficult too. Most of the things we want to do we can't, and the other things we must. I don't know. But to-morrow…'

She looked up quickly.

‘Not here—not like this.'

‘Why?'

‘Hush—don't shout, Charles. Not to-morrow.'

He looked at her, suspicious and unable to speak for a time. Her eyes pleaded with him.

‘Why not? Aren't you allowed?'

She shook her head.

‘It's not that. But—not to-morrow, Charles. Don't you see? I can't; you know I can't.'

She seemed to be pleading with him, but he did not know why. Her soft pleading, which could not find its words, made him quiet.

‘Tell me; tell me why. I'll understand.'

‘Well,' she said, ‘after to-day, how can I? It wouldn't be the same. I mean—I must think. Oh, how can I tell you?'

‘I don't understand,' he said patiently. ‘Tell me what. Try. You seem as though you've gone quite away, now, and I know you haven't. You seem older than you are.'

‘You're impatient,' she murmured, so softly that he could hardly hear her. ‘If you had something given to you—and you wanted it very much and yet you didn't know till then you wanted it—wouldn't you—wouldn't you have to take it away all by yourself, and…'

He understood, but his face was dull still with the pain of disappointment.

‘Yes, I see,' he said. ‘But—why? Why away from me?'

‘I must think,' she repeated. ‘You've started me thinking.'

He said nothing, looking at her face, expecting her to go on. She turned away from him.

‘I don't often think,' she said at last. ‘Now you've made me.'

He moved nervously, and felt the short grass prick upward under his palm.

‘How do you know you don't think?'

‘I don't think,' she repeated with slow obstinacy. ‘I don't want to. I'm not like you. You do, I know. But I don't. It upsets me if I think; but now you've started me, you see.'

She said this simply, as though it were too clear to be in need of argument or explanation. Her eyes upon his face were soft and kind, but still the unseen shadow hung restless in their depths, and he felt that it had shaken the union between them, threatening it. To him her impulse to be apart from him was not clear at all; he could affirm it to himself in his mind, but it was not clear, for it was against the way of his desire. Nor did he understand thought as something separated from living, from the actual daily experience of the senses; to think of thought as thought, as something that could proceed now and in an hour be turned off, like water from a tap, was beyond his conception—so far beyond it that he could believe it possible when she said it, though he could not understand. While she was by some instinct guided to a conclusion and a determination, he, who tried now to follow in her flight with the faltering tread of reason still half-dormant, came far behind her. So, as he had said, he was bewildered by her ageless assurance; and the effort of thought troubled by emotions made him weary and sink beneath a gusty sadness that worried at his heart, while the sun shone warmly and her beauty, so near and perceptible to him there, was as remote from his touch as the beauty of a portrait.

‘Why must we think, either of us?' he cried; and the breeze seemed to pause and listen, just as she turned her face to him from looking blindly away into the day.

‘Can't we just live, without thinking? It spoils everything. I was terribly happy, and now I feel sad. And you're sad too. Everything's sad, because it's spoiled. Everything, everything.'

He hid his face in his arms.

‘Don't be sad,' she said. Her hand, stretched out to touch his head, was quiet and burning in the light; the fingers lay close together, calm and full of sleepy peace, with thin pencillings of shadow between them curving at the knuckles and running past the delicate cloudy pink of the nails. He, however, did not see this, for while he felt with troubled joy its weight pressing upon his hair, his half-closed eyes were wandering among the huge points and buds and trunks of the short grass an inch away from them. He did not want to look at her now, for she was near again.

When he turned over on his back, keeping his eyes closed, her hand remained upon him, curving over its down-turned palm, and lay lightly across his eyes. If he opened them he saw a dim colour of flesh, with light coming sharply in under the edges; it smelt warm and alive, as though her naked body were against his face. By moving his head a little his lips were brought to touch that warm, intimate place where the foreign skin lay living over the artery in the palm, so that they trembled upon her heart itself. She let the weight now of her hand and arm rest on his mouth, and her whole body was still. Under them the earth seemed to surge upwards with the renewal of its growth in that season; he felt it pulsing beneath him, but that was the working of his own heart; and he felt her hand resting upon him, her heart beating mysteriously in the hollow of the palm.

‘Nothing like this has ever happened,' he whispered into her hand; but she seemed not to have heard, nor to have felt the movement of his lips on the skin's velvet roughness. The sun fell in a stream upon his closed eyelids. Proud and brilliant in the height of its noon, the day was all about them.

The holiday passed in rain and sunshine. Charles, shut within the stillness and easy familiarity of his room, worked in the afternoons. During the week of rain and storm that followed the great clearness of the first weekend, he remained there alone, and sometimes at night went up again when dinner was ended, leaving his mother sitting by the fire in the big room downstairs, whose wide windows faced east and north. She was always busying her hands in something; when she had finished writing letters or sewing, she did patience games, sitting up very straight behind the little cards laid out neatly in their ranks, slowly twisting the gold bracelet on her left wrist while she considered what next to do. It seemed to make no difference to her whether she succeeded or failed in getting a patience out. He longed for her to show whether she cared, for he became, in that week, impatient under his own restraint; it was doubtful whether she even thought about it, for her mind seemed to be far away from the dull green baize and the coloured problems of the cards. If she looked up and saw him there, observing her silently, his book face-down on his knee, she smiled; but he had no idea of what she was thinking, and would not have asked her, nor would she have offered to tell him. This wordless companionship exasperated Emily every night, and when she took the hot milk in to them she never failed to break in upon it with some chirped exclamation of surprise, and a few challenging remarks as she put down the tray and straightened up again to wish them a good night. Her cheerful voice sounded loud and vigorous across the pool of lamplight on the table.

It rained steadily during that week; in the room, with its lamplight and firelight and dark drawn curtains, the sound of rain at night was comforting: it beat in gusts of frail fury on the windows at the north end, where shadow lay on walls and floor, beyond the light; and when such a storm ceased, as abruptly as if the whole sky were clear again, the clouds all gone, they could hear the laughing trickle of water on the earth outside, the mellow chuckling run of drain-pipes, and over all that great silence which night rain leaves behind it. Charles looked at the fire, and thought of the drenched country-side stretching from the windows to the east, cold and murmurous with water under the silence of the returning stars; and when the north-west wind rose again, waking him perhaps from sleep in his room under the roof, he felt it blow across the flat top of the rise out there, and toss the trees of the grove shaking free a ceaseless scatter of drops that fell on the chill dead leaves of the floor, while night stood still, blow how the wind would. He saw the top of the rise desolated with peace beneath the white stars.

He was at first unhappy and distressed during those days, fretting with impatience against the weather's assurance of his loneliness, and anxious, too, for his mother to speak of what she now knew. Work helped him to forget the passing of time; and in the mornings he took his thick shoes and a coat, and went out walking, pleased to feel the softness of the soil underfoot and the coldness of the grass heavy with rain, but impatient at first even in his pleasure, and discontented with what had seemed beautiful. Trudging through the still fields, with a wet wind cutting across his face, he thought of nothing but the girl; over every moment of that sunny morning he went, again and again, finding it each time more lovely, and more unlikely, until he began to wonder whether it had happened at all, and whether the gestures, the thoughts, and the mysterious contact of that helpless look were not the wishes of his imagination. Yet he must believe for with all the reality of pain her memory was in him wherever he walked; it grew in his blood and was borne through his body, so that at night he dreamed of her, and by day her face and her voice, and her eyes more than all, looking at him without release, haunted his troubled mind.

It seemed to him that he had approached near some enormous understanding. In moments of nervous exhilaration he could laugh, when he was alone, to think how near he had come to a great knowledge, and how thinly he had passed it; even in the midst of work, which he attacked with a new fury of purpose, the page would blur and vanish as he stared, his pen would halt and its dark ink dry on the nib, while he looked into her face that now was there where paper and words had been, returning his look with darkened eyes that could not move from his own.

He did not see that the year's work had been too hard for him, and was already thrusting him up into a condition of unrelaxed nervous tension; nor that the same force of rebellion and dislike for the unnatural life of the School, the very force that had driven him to work so desperately, was now driving him farther, to a conception of the girl from which it was unlikely that he would ever be freed. Already, with him at least, the thing was done. That moment of rare spiritual exaltation in the sun had given him an experience of something which it is not for many to know, but for which all those who have known it strive in the flesh and sometimes in the spirit, to come at it again, to lose their identity in it, and in it cease to exist. They strive, and fail because they strive; the flesh deceives with promises impossible, and the spirit is untutored. Such knowledge is only come on unawares, and unawares is lost again, while the remembrance of what it was remains and grows, taunting with its own futility the yearning of the heart.

But with Charles a first unquestioning simplicity rested, and though he was haunted as men are by dreams, he became happy also. Alone in his room, or at large on the wet country roads and in the fields, he rediscovered his joy in life, and let go from his mind the sense of some gentle antagonism in his mother, not yet realizing that nothing he did escaped her notice now. He had changed in his face; it became at last, beneath its mobility, more tranquil. She observed this also, and for some time remained silent, allowing him to drift back into his former acceptance of her; but at length, when the failure of fine weather seemed not to trouble the rapt inward concentration of his mind, curiosity was aroused in her. Choosing her time, she suggested that he might go over to the new farm for her, for O'Neill had mentioned that the McLeods' cow was not milking well, and she had thought of sending butter, and eggs and fruit also, to Mrs. McLeod.