until after trudging up the hill he topped its crest and was lost to
sight. Calladine then, a prey to such loneliness as he had never
dreamt, returned into the hut to wait. Twilight came, the long, cold,
late-winter twilight when the world seems dead. The last vestiges of
colour faded out of the west. Such sharp shadows as there had been,
merged into a greyer, universal shadow; the hard black and the hard
white turned to grey, vast and mournful; the sky was all grey now,
and the dusk heavy with impending snow. The quietness and the poverty
of the hut settled down round Calladine. He had examined its few poor
resources, fingering the utensils he found in the little cupboard on
the wall, the tea-pot, the canister of tea and sugar, the rasher of
bacon put ready on a plate; but now he sat listless, with hanging
hands, and not so much as a sound came to make him raise his head.
He did not know how long he sat there. The darkness deepened; soon
the black night was again over the Downs, vaulted; the big golden
stars, and the dim huge shapes of the hills. He was without sensation,
numb, having the consciousness only of his extreme solitude. So numb
was he, that he was scarcely aware what he waited for. He simply
sat on, in complete darkness now, feeling neither hunger nor cold,
forgetful almost of his sorrow, patient only like a man condemned to an
indefinite suspense.
When he heard the sound of a voice singing out on the hill, he raised
his head and waited. The voice drew nearer, singing a cheerful song;
it trilled and carolled, as in an exuberant lightheartedness. To
Calladine it came with a strange effect, this voice singing out in
the night, unexplained, bearing down upon the hut, frivolous and
rollicking. Suddenly it sounded quite close, outside. The door was
torn open, a figure carrying a lantern appeared on the threshold, and
Calladine beheld the grinning face and battered hat of Olver Lovel.
The boy carried parcels in his arms, besides the lantern swinging from
his wrist. He appeared in excellent spirits, grinning broadly, skipping
as he stood on the threshold of the door, with little excited skips
from foot to foot. He seemed scarcely able to contain his high spirits
and his excitement. When he saw that the hut was already occupied, he
gaped stupidly, then burst into peals of laughter. Calladine, remaining
seated, looked at him without a word. He perceived nothing startling
in the advent of this apparition, apathetic as he was, and at the same
time strung up to the most improbable occurrences. It seemed to him
quite natural that Olver should stand shouting with laughter in the
doorway; he saw nothing grotesque in the encounter of himself with the
crazy boy out in this hut on the hills. Clare!--this was the note to
which Clare had re-tuned his life.
“Mr. Calladine!” said Olver, ceasing from his laughter. He came forward
and put his parcels and his lantern down on the table. Its rays
illuminated the little hut. “So you were waiting for them, sitting
here in the dark, were you?” he observed.
“Will they come?” asked Calladine.
“Oh yes, they’ll come,” replied Olver easily. “But they won’t let you
stop here, you know,” he added. “No, nor me either,” he pursued, coming
closer to Calladine and speaking confidentially. “They’ll put us both
out into the snow, get-yourselves-home-as-best-you-can. They won’t
care. They won’t notice us, scarcely. They’re in a dream. Nod to me,
perhaps; give me a pat, like a dog. Good Olver; he brings our food. But
do they eat it? they seem like they don’t need food.”
“Have you seen them, then?” said Calladine.
“Seen them? Lord bless you, yes; and seen you too, wandering round with
Daisy. I was behind you, many and many a time, but you didn’t turn.”
He began now to unpack his parcels, bringing out a loaf of bread, a
tin of milk, some eggs, and finally some raw meat in slices. Calladine
watched him in silence. He disposed of everything in a business-like
manner, fetching two plates out of the cupboard, laying the table,
putting ready the tea-pot and the canister.
“You might well have lit the lamp for them,” he said reproachfully to
Calladine.
He lit the little paraffin lamp himself, and the hut was further
irradiated by its yellow glow. The hut made now a patch of warmth and
light among the cold, dark hills; a box of light, like a star in the
blackness of space. Calladine felt the warmth creep through him, as
though he were admitted to a hint of the sufficient and radiant secret
of those lovers. The poverty of the shelter disappeared now, in the
golden warmth of the light from within. And he felt that he, and not
they, was the pauper.
Olver meanwhile had set the meat to fry over the lamp. It frizzled as
he turned it with a fork, and he crouched over it, humming his song.
“You seem very well contented,” said Calladine.
Olver looked up, having forgotten Calladine’s presence.
“I am contented, because Nicholas is happy,” he replied.
“Simple enough!” said Calladine.
“But she is happy too,” said Olver, sitting back on his heels and
staring at Calladine.
“He is only a mad boy,” thought Calladine to himself.
Olver sang. He sang an old song, of a girl drowned in the mill-pool
because she had lost her lover. The wistful beat of the ballad came
back at the end of each verse; it droned on, with mournful persistence.
At last Calladine could bear its monotony no longer, and asked, “When
will they come?”
Olver shrugged. “Who can tell?”
“Where are they?” Calladine asked.
Olver shrugged again. “Who can tell?”
Calladine remembered how often he had asked Clare, “Where have you
been? where have you been?”
He remembered that her answers had never left him any the wiser; he had
never come near to what he really wanted to know.
What was it, indeed, that he had really wanted to know? the whole
secret of her being, to be explained in a dozen words?
He said to Olver, “It is night, it is cold; have they lost their way
out on the hills?”
Olver laughed at him. “Lost? They?”
“They are only human!” cried Calladine, afraid. He got up and stood
over Olver. “Tell me, they are human, aren’t they?”
Olver laughed again.
Calladine went to the door. He opened it and looked out; the cold met
him, and the stars in the blackness. “Clare!” he cried. “Clare!”
“I am going mad,” he said to himself. “I am going out of my mind.”
Looking back into the hut, he saw Olver still on his knees on the
floor, prodding at the meat over the lamp. He went back, bent down, and
cried close to Olver’s ear, “What are we doing here? they are keeping
us waiting.”
“We don’t count,” replied Olver indifferently.
He began his song again. He had taken his mirror from his pocket, and
was squinting into it, at the reflection of the hut; on each beat of
the measure, he nodded down towards it.
“Her hair was tangled in the reeds.
Her hair so gold and gay,”
he sang.
“Would you like to look into my mirror?” he asked Calladine.
An idea took him; he scrambled to his feet.
“They’re all afraid of my mirror,” he said. “_She_ wouldn’t look into
it, for fear of what she might see there. But you shall look. Look into
it now, and you’ll see them; you shall see them as they were in here,
last night.”
Calladine pushed him away; made him stagger against the wall of the hut.
“You would see them! you would see them!” cried Olver, delighted.
Neither of them noticed that the door had opened, and that Lovel stood
in the hut.
“Nicco!” cried Olver.
Calladine wheeled round. Clare came into the hut, and her face shone
out like Lovel’s, both golden in the light, both arrested in the midst
of their carelessness.
Lovel spoke to Calladine.
“This was the only place we had,” he said, “couldn’t you leave it to
us?”
Clare looked at Calladine; her face wore that oblique, fugitive look
which he had known, and loved, and dreaded.
She turned to Lovel, and they swayed towards one another as though
something drew them.
“We had better go,” she said, inviting him.
“Yes,” he replied, drifting idly on the stream of her will, of their
common will, one with her.
She gave him her hand, and in the gold light they hung briefly,
transient creatures of eternal flight. The curtain of night and stars
stretched behind them, in the rectangle of the open door.
“The scenery is set!” cried Calladine hysterically, pointing with his
hand.
The rays of the lantern streamed out towards the snow, gilding a path
up the whiteness, quickly lost into the dark.
“They need no shelter,” cried Calladine.
The hills were outside, waiting, and the stars, silent.
“Why linger?” cried Calladine to Clare and Lovel.
They faded into the night, noiseless and swift. Calladine ran out of
the hut, he ran up and down, he cried “Clare! Clare!” and the hills
answered him. He came back into the hut, where Olver, dancing, held the
mirror up to his eyes. “Look! and you shall see them.” He dashed the
mirror out of Olver’s hand; it smashed upon the ground. “You will never
see them again, now,” cried Olver, “you will never see them again.”
+-------------------------------------------------+
|Transcriber’s note: |
| |
|Obvious typographic errors have been corrected. |
| |
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