Unknown (70 page)

He heard a half-extinguished brand, in the centre of the dying fire, fall heavily among the red ashes; and for the tick of a second his heart began to beat again, wildly, helplessly, violently, just as it had done when he heard ... or dreamed he heard . . . that terrible voice.

"This is especially the case when a number of people, century

after century, has believed. . . . Thought is a real thing-------"

Here Mr. Geard's own process of thought—as he tugged at his pillow to prop up his head a little—was interrupted by a pricking of his conscience. His effort to get the pillow into a comfortable position conveyed his mind, over the seven miles of moonlit water-meadows, to his sleeping wife. He remembered how the grey head of the descendant of the House of Rhys always lay on her own pillow, at her own side of the bed, leaving his all smooth and undisturbed and never removing it. He remembered how astonished he had been to learn from Crummie—who loved to play the role of sentimental ambassador between her mother and father—that all the time he was away in Norfolk with Canon Crow, Megan Geard had left his pillow untouched in its place. . . .

But he made an effort of his will and dismissed Megan completely from his mind, as completely as if they had never lived together. In these deep interior inhumanities, Mr. Geard was shameless. This devotee of Christ frequently took up his conscience by the heels and hung it clear outside the remotest house-walls of his consciousness. He now worked the interior cogs and pistons of his mind till, like a great gaping engine, with grappling-irons held outward, towards those dusky rafters above him, his consciousness adjusted itself to catch a clue that kept teasing and tantalising him.

“Thought is a real thing,” he said to himself. "It is a live thing. It creates; it destroys; it begets; it projects its living offspring. Like certain forms of physical pain thoughts can take organic shapes. They can live and grow and generate, independently of the person in whose being they originated.

“For a thousand years the Grail has been attracting thought to itself, because of the magnetism of Christ's Blood. The Grail is now an organic nucleus of creation and destruction. Christ's Blood cries aloud from it by day and by night Yes, yes,” so his thoughts ran on, “yes, and bugger me black!”—This was a queer original oath peculiar to Mr. Geard—"I know now what the Grail is. It is the desire of the generations mingling like wTater with the Blood of Christ, and caught in a fragment of Substance that is beyond Matter! It is a little nucleus of Eternity, dropped somehow from the outer spaces upon one particular spot!'5

Here Mr. Geard stretched out his head, like a mud-turtle, and peered down at the crack in the floor, through which he had heard the old couple in the room below relieving Nature.

“I hope,” said Mr. Geard to himself, “that that extremely nervous Sergeant didn't forget to give my pretty Daisy-Queen a good feed of oats!”

THE SILVER BOWL

I WANT A CHILD FROM YOU, DO YOU HEAR ? What's the matter with you? I want a child, I tell you!"

It was these words of Will Zoyland—flung out angrily at her as he jumped in his car to drive to Mark Court early on Sunday afternoon—that kept ringing in the ears of Nell as she moved about Whitelake Cottage, cleaning and tidying things up, on Easter Monday.

“What made him think of that just now?” she said to herself. “He can't read a person's thoughts. He carCt know about it . . . how could he? Oh no, no, no!” The truth was that the girl was pretty sure . . . although not absolutely sure . . . that Sam's child had already begun its obscure, embryonic life within her.

She had begged him to come out to see her today, knowing that the popular holiday would keep Will safe at Wookey Hole. She had been.longing with a great longing to tell Sam what she hoped for. But now she was teased by this tormenting question— should she tell him what Will had said? And should she raise the agitating point whether or no it was best to pretend to Will that this child, if it did really come, was his child?

Oh, if only Sam could gather up the spirit and resolution to carry her off, to find work to do, so that he could support her, her and their child, somewhere, anywhere, so it were far from Glastonbury!

Let Will do what he liked then; divorce her; refuse to divorce her! What did she care, as long as Sam and she were together?

She had been living in one long delicious trance since that night. Sam had come out only once to see her since; and on that occasion had seemed absorbed in his own thoughts; but he had been gentle and sweet to her and she had felt so happy, pressing him against her, holding him, hugging him, tight and fast, with this thrilling chance of all chances between them, that she had not inquisitioned him or persecuted hinn with her problem. But this angry challenge of Will's flung out at her after she had managed to evade any serious love-making, had broken up her radiant dream.

Troubled and anxious and full of nameless fears she went about her work this morning. She had risen early, after waking before dawn, from a disturbed sleep—a sleep in which she dreamed that it really was Will's child and not Sam's at all that had just begun its mysterious life-processes within her—and her mental agitation had been increased rather than diminished by the nature of the day as it grew light.

It was absolutely still after the wind of the previous twenty-four hours; but it was grey and damp, clouds in the sky, heavy mists clinging to the meadows. It looked as if it were going to prove a very gloomy, if not a disastrously wet Bank Holiday.

Nell was startled at the havoc the great wind had done among her wild plants, so carefully tended. Her little grass lawn, sloping down to the river bank, was strewn with twigs and leaves from trees quite far away; and some brick tiles, too, had been blown from the roof. The dead stillness of the air after such a wind-hurricane was itself disturbing.

The day wTas one of those days when human beings who have anything on their minds, anything on their consciences, cannot refrain from a certain listening. It was a day when guilty people could hear their hearts beating, hear their clocks ticking, hear the faint dripping into sink or barrel of the least drop of water from tap or pipe.

Nell washed up her breakfast things more rapidly than usual. She made her bed and tidied her bedroom quicker than she was wont to do. She dusted her parlour. She went down on her knees and washed with soap and water the chequered linoleum on her kitchen floor. All the time she was doing these things she would glance at the window to see if Sam's figure were approaching and then draw her eyes hurriedly away from the menacing inertness of the weather outside.

But below her trouble over Will's fierce words ... so fatally well-timed . . . and below the preoccupation of her work and her longing for her lover to come . . . there kept drumming and humming in her deeper ears a low refrain of exultation. “It's begun! It's begun! To me myself, and not another, it has happened! My true love's child inside me . . . safe inside me . . , and going to grow and grow and grow!”

She sat down on the sofa-couch and picked up a booklet, bound in paper, that lay there. It was a Marxian pamphlet left by her brother Dave.

Stubbornly she tried to concentrate her thoughts upon the formidable argument this little work unfolded. “Children,” she read, “are wards of the State, even in their mother's womb. Motherhood is an occupation as dangerous, as necessary, as important to society, as to be a peasant, a factory-worker, a miner. Religious marriage is a bourgeois superstition, grossly intermingled with the historic iniquity of private property. No human creature has a right to claim possession of the person of another. Children are the creation of Nature, but their well-being is the responsibility of the State. When the life of the foetus is-------”

As Nell read these words a sudden panic seized her. Something leapt up from these compact, official, emphatic sentences that was much more formidable than their obvious meaning. Sitting there in her bright, crocus-yellow spring dress, covered with a loose, light-green over-all, she suddenly began to shiver from head to foot. Her teeth began to chatter; and she threw up her hands and pressed them against her ears, as if she heard the marching feet of an army of executioners. She had not really understood at all the impact af what she read but something about the tone of it—its air of irreversible and dooix -like finality —filled her with a blind terror.

Her teeth chattered so loudly that she clapped her hands to her mouth. Her shiverings made the skirt of the crocus-yellow gown stir faintly, like the underwing of the moth that boys call Yellow UnderwTing, when the wind catches it. She got a vision of herself as being caught in a long fatal process of Nature from which there was no outlet, no possible escape. She felt the intimate quality of her own private personality now; she felt the Nell she had lived with all her grown-up life, the Nell with the soft hair,, the passionate mouth, the full breasts, the Nell with the mania for planting wild flowers in a flower garden, the Nell who loved scrubbing but hated cooking, the Nell who used to endure a husband and now idolised a lover, the Nell who loathed reading and liked using her needle, the Nell who preferred dreaming by open windows to talking by glowing hearths, the Nell who always found oranges so sweet and marmalade so bitter, and it seemed to her now, as she began crumpling in her fingers this odious pamphlet written by men who knewT nothing about women, that this Nell who was so dear to her, whose every expression in the mirror she knew so well, this Nell whose teeth she cleaned, whose hair she brushed, whose little ways were her ways, was no longer hers, no longer her private possession. This soft body, every part of which held secret nerves of its own, was now bought and sold. Yes, yes, it was handed over, bound and fettered, to a long inescapable doom that had been prepared, millions of years ago—not for the Nell she knew—but for Females in General; a doom that must needs lead her on, deeper and deeper, into the raw, heavy, monstrous, impersonal mire of brutal creation!

She crumpled the unlucky pamphlet into a tight ball of paper and tossed it into the fire. She felt better after she had done this: but she still felt as if it were more than she could bear to hear any man, even Sam, laying down rules for human life. Blind, and dumb, and inarticulate, she felt something surging up within her, that, if she only could express it, would blow all the institutions in the world sky-high. “My womb has conceived,” was the burden of what she ached to cry aloud, “and I tell you this is something that has broken all your laws. It's a miracle; do you hear me? A miracle has happened. And Fm the one—not any of you mutterers and starers and examiners and inspectors—Fm the one to tell the world what is the secret of life!”

She went into the kitchen and snatched up an orange from a bowl on her dresser. Into the top of this orange she thrust her forefinger till she had made a deep round hole. Into the hole in the orange she now pushed one, two, three small lumps of sugar; and then clutching the sticky, fragrant, yellow skin tightly in her fingers, she pressed her mouth to the hole and sucked furiously, keeping her teeth sufficiently closed so as to push back the half-melted sugar but drawing up the sweet juice into her mouth. She placed herself in front of the fire and stared down into the red coals squeezing, sucking, swallowing.

She found the warmth of the fire comforting as it reached her legs and her skin; and when the moment came for her to tear open the orange and bury her face in its sugary interior, tearing the sticky pulp from the bitter rind with her teeth, she found that her whole mood had completely changed.

She threw the orange skin into the flames then and gathering her over-all tightly about her she moved still closer to the bars, letting the warmth extend to as much of her person as she possibly could, and snuffing up with luxurious satisfaction the smell of the burning orange skin. She began to grow impatient for Sam now. She thought of how she would kiss him when he held her in his arms. “I'll kiss his eyes,” she thought. “It's nice when he shuts his eyes.” And then she thought, “I love him when he works his chin up and down, when he gets worried by anything.”

But Sam did not come. It was half-past one now; and she said to herself, “I ought to get myself something to eat but I shan't do it.”

She put more coals on the fire and went to the couch and lay down upon it. She could see a fragment of the garden out of the window; and how dark it was, and how frighteningly hushed and still!

She had an abscess in her gum above one of her back teeth; and this began to hurt her a good deal. The orange-sucking must have started it. She searched for it with her tongue. She suddenly began to feel more occupied with this trifling annoyance than with Sam or her child or Zoyland or the strange nature of the weather outside. She shut her eyes. At last as she pressed her tongue against her aching gum a drowsiness stole over her that almost took her consciousness away. The hurting in her mouth became a thing entirely distinct from her personality; and when her drifting thoughts reverted to the embryo life within her, that also seemed something quite outside of her and independent of her.

And then before she realised what had happened Sam had come. Before she was fully awake he had given her a fierce, violent hug, too hard and breathless to be called tender, too brief to be called passionate; and there they were, sitting on the couch side by side, staring wildly, confusedly, and helplessly at each other.

She had told him already about the child.

“'Are you absolutely sure?” he had murmured.

And she had nodded emphatically.

Something in his manner had driven her to go on talking about it in a way she had never intended to do. It was a remoteness in him different from anything she had ever known I It was as if he had been clothed from head to foot in invisible chain armour; and not only so, but had had his vizor down, through which his little, bewildered, bear-eyes gazed out at her, puzzled, ambiguous, and with an obstinate film over them.

Everything was so wretchedly different from what she had expected! Her thoughts as to what he would do had been very vague. But she had in her dreamy way, been feeding herself with the fantastic hope that he would cry out to her at once—“Come then, my true love! Nothing henceforth shall part us!”