1
When Judith was eighteen, she saw that the house next door, empty for
years, was getting ready again. Gardeners mowed and mowed, and rolled
and rolled the tennis-court; and planted tulips and forget-me-nots in
the stone urns that bordered the lawn at the river’s edge. The ivy’s
long fingers were torn away from the windows, and the solid grey stone
front made prim and trim. When the blinds went up and the familiar oval
mirror-backs once more stared from the bedroom windows it seemed as if
the long time of emptiness had never been, and that the next-door
children must still be there with their grandmother,--mysterious and
thrilling children who came and went, and were all cousins except two
who were brothers, and all boys except one, who was a girl; and who
dropped over the peach-tree wall into Judith’s garden with invitations
to tea and hide-and-seek.
But in truth all was different now. The grandmother had died soon after
she heard Charlie was killed. He had been her favourite, her darling
one. He had, astoundingly, married the girl Mariella when they were both
nineteen, and he just going to the front. He had been killed directly,
and some months afterwards Mariella had had a baby.
Mariella was twenty-two years old now, Charlie’s widow with a child
Charlie had begotten. It seemed fantastic when you looked back and
remembered them both. The grandmother had left the house to Mariella,
and she was coming back to live there and have a gay time now that the
war was well over and Charlie (so you supposed) forgotten.
Would Mariella remember Judith next door, and how they used to share a
governess and do the same lessons in spite of Mariella’s four years’
seniority? Miss Pim wrote: ‘Judith is an exceptionally clever child,
especially about essays and botany. She laps up knowledge as a kitten
laps milk’. The letter had been left on Mamma’s desk: unforgettable,
shameful, triumphant day.
Mariella on the other hand--how she used to sit with her clear light
eyes blank, and her polite cool little treble saying: ‘Yes, Miss Pim,’
‘No, Miss Pim,’--and never be interested and never understand! She wrote
like a child of six. She would not progress. And yet, as Miss Pim said,
Mariella was by no means what you’d call a stupid girl.... By no means a
stupid girl: thrilling to Judith. Apart from the thrill which her own
queerness gave, she had upon her the reflected glory of the four
boy-cousins who came for the holidays,--Julian, Charlie, Martin and
Roddy.
Now they were all grown up. Would they come back when Mariella came? And
would they remember Judith at all, and be glad to see her again? She
knew that, anyway, they would not remember so meticulously, so achingly
as herself: people never did remember her so hard as she remembered
them,--their faces especially. In earliest childhood it was plain that
nobody else realized the wonder, the portentous mystery of faces. Some
patterns were so pure, so clear and lovely you could go on looking at
them for ever. Charlie’s and Marietta’s were like that. It was odd that
the same bits of face shaped and arranged a little differently gave such
deplorable results. Julian was the ugly one. And sometimes the ugliest
faces did things that were suddenly lovely. Julian’s did. You dared not
take eyes off a stranger’s face for fear of missing a change in it.
‘My dear! How your funny little girl stares. She makes me quite
uncomfortable.’
‘Don’t worry, my dear. She doesn’t even see you. Always in the clouds.’
The stupids went on stupidly chattering. They little knew about faces.
They little knew what a fearful thing could happen to a familiar
face--Miss Pim’s for instance--surprised off its guard and broken up
utterly into grossness, withered into hatred or cunning; or what a
mystery it was to see a face day after day and find it always strange
and surprising. Roddy’s was that sort, though at first it had seemed
quite dull and flat. It had some secret in it.
At night in bed she invented faces, putting the pieces together till
suddenly there they were!--quite clear. They had names and vague sorts
of bodies and lived independent lives inside her head. Often they turned
out to have a likeness to Roddy. The truth was, Judith thought now,
Roddy’s was a dream rather than a real face. She felt she had never seen
it as it actually was, but always with that overstressed significance,
that haunting quality of curiousness which a face in a dream bears.
Queer Roddy must be twenty-one now; and Martin twenty; and Julian
twenty-four at least; and beautiful Charlie would have been Mariella’s
age if such an incredible thing had not happened to him. They would not
want anything to do with her. They would be grown up and smart, with
friends from London; and she still had her hair down and wore black
cotton stockings, and blushed wildly, hopelessly, eternally, when
addressed in public. It would be appalling to meet them again,
remembering so much they had certainly forgotten. She would be
tongue-tied.
In the long spaces of being alone which they only, at rarer and rarer
intervals, broke, she had turned them over, fingered them so lovingly,
explored them so curiously that, melting into the darkly-shining
enchanted shadow-stuff of remembered childhood, they had become
well-nigh fantastic creatures. Presumably they had realised long ago
that Charlie was dead. When they came back again, without him, she would
have to believe it too. To see them again would be a deep wrenching sort
of hurt. If only it could be supposed it would hurt them too!... But
Charlie had of course been dead for years; and of course they did not
know what it was to want to know and understand and absorb people to
such a degree that it was a fever. Or if they did, it was not upon her,
trifling female creature, that they applied their endeavours. Even
Martin, the stupid and ever-devoted, had felt, for a certainty, no
mysterious excitement about her.
When she looked backwards and thought about each of them separately,
there were only a few odd poignant trivialities of actual fact to
remember.
Mariella’s hair was cut short like a boy’s. It came over her forehead in
a fringe, and beneath it her lucid mermaid’s eyes looked out in a blind
transparent stare, as if she were dazzled. Her skin was milk-white, her
lips a small pink bow, her neck very long on sloping shoulders, her body
tall and graceful with thin snakey long limbs. Her face was without
expression, composed and cool-looking. The only change it ever suffered
was the perfect upward lift of the lips when they smiled their limited
smile. Her voice was a small high flute, with few inflections,
monotonous but soft and sweet-tempered. She spoke little. She was remote
and unruffled, coolly friendly. She never told you things.
She had a great Dane and she went about alone with him for choice, her
arm round his neck. One day he was sick and started groaning, and his
stomach swelled and he went into the thickest part of the laurel bushes
and died of poison in half an hour. Mariella came from a French lesson
in time to receive his dying look. She thought he reproached her, and
her head, fainting in anguish, fell over his, and she said to him: ‘It
wasn’t my fault.’ She lay beside him and would not move. The gardener
buried him in the evening and she lay on the grave, pale, extinguished
and silent. When Judith went home to supper she was still lying there.
Nobody saw her cry, and no one ever heard her speak of him again.
She was the one who always picked up naked baby-birds, and worms and
frogs and caterpillars. She had a toad which she loved, and she wanted
to keep a pet snake. One day she brought one home from the long-grass
meadow; but Miss Pim had a faint turn and the grandmother instructed
Julian to kill it in the back yard.
Charlie dared her to go three times running through the field with the
bull in it, and she did. Charlie wouldn’t. She could walk without a
tremor on the bit of the roof that made everyone else feel watery
inside; and she delighted in thunderstorms. Her hair crackled with
electricity, and if she put her fingers on you you felt a tiny tingling
of shock. She was elated and terrifying, standing at the window and
smiling among all the flashes and thunder-cracks.
Julian was the one she seemed to like best; but you never knew. She
moved among them all with detached undemanding good-humour. Sometimes
Judith thought Mariella despised her.
But she was kind too: she made funny jokes to cheer you up after tears.
Once Judith heard them whisper: ‘Let’s all run away from Judy’--and they
all did. They climbed up the poplar tree at the bottom of the garden and
made noises out of it at her, when she came by, pretending not to be
looking for them.
She went away and cried under the nursery sofa, hoping to die there
before discovery. The darkness had a thick dusty acrid smell, and
breathing was difficult. After hours, there were steps in the room; and
then Mariella lifted the sofa frill and looked in.
‘Judy, come out. There’s chocolate biscuits for tea.’
With a fresh burst of tears, Judith came.
‘Oo! You do look cry-ey.’ She was dismayed. ‘Shall I try to make you
laugh?’
Mariella unbuttoned her frock, stepped out of it and danced grotesquely
in her holland knickers. Judith began to giggle and sob at the same
time.
‘I’m the fat man,’ said Mariella.
She blew out her cheeks, stuffed a cushion in her knickers and strutted
coarsely. That was irresistible. You had to squeal with laughter. After
that the others came in rather quietly and were very polite, not looking
till her face had stopped being blotched and covering her hiccups with
cheerful conversation. And after tea they asked her to choose the game.
So everything was all right.
It was autumn, and soon the lawn had a chill smoke-blue mist on it. All
the blurred heavy garden was as still as glass, bowed down, folded up
into itself, deaf, dumb and blind with secrets. Under the mist the
silky river lay flat and flawless, wanly shining. All the colours of sky
and earth were thin ghosts of themselves: and on the air were the
troubling bitter-sweet odours of decay.
When the children came from hiding in the bushes they looked all damp
and tender, with a delicate glow in their faces, and wet lashes, and
drops of wet on their hair. Their breath made mist in front of them.
They were beautiful and mysterious like the evening.
The happiness was a swelling pressure in the head and chest, too
exciting to bear. Going home under the willows in the little connecting
pathway between the two gardens Judith suddenly made up some poetry.
* * * * *
Stupid funny serious Martin had red cheeks and brown eyes and dirty
knees. His legs were very hairy for his age. He had an extremely kind
nature. He was the one they always teased and scored off. Charlie used
to say: ‘Let’s think of a sell for Martin,’ and when he had been sold,
as he always was, they danced in front of him shouting: ‘Sold again!
Sold again!’ He never minded. Sometimes it was Judith who thought of the
best sells, which made her proud. She was very cruel to him, but he
remained faithful and loving, and occasionally sent her chaotic sheets
of dirt and ink from school, signing them: ‘Yrs truly, M. Fyfe.’
He loved Roddy too,--patiently, maternally. Sometimes they went about
each with an arm round the other’s neck; and they always chose each
other first in picking sides. Judith always prayed Charlie would pick
her first, and sometimes he did, but not always.
Martin had coagulated toffee in one pocket and hairy acid drops in the
other. He was always eating something. When there was nothing else he
ate raw onions and stank to Heaven.
He was the best of them all at running and chucking, and his muscle was
his fondest care and pride. What he liked best was to take Roddy or
Judith in the canoe and go bird’s nesting up the creek. Roddy did not
tease him about Judith--Roddy never cared what other people did enough
to tease them about it--but the others were apt to, so he was rather
ashamed, and spoke roughly and pushed her in public; and only showed he
loved her when they were alone together.
Once there was hide-and-seek and Charlie was he. Martin asked Judith to
hide with him. They lay in the orchard, under the hay-stack, with their
cheeks pressed into the warm sweet-smelling turf. Judith watched the
insects labouring over blades of grass; and Martin watched her.
‘Charlie’s a long time coming,’ said Judith.
‘I don’t think so. Lie still.’
Judith dropped back, rolled over and surveyed him out of the corner of
an eye. His face seen so near looked funny and rough and enormous; and
she laughed. He said:
‘The grass is wet. Sit on my chest.’
She sat on his hard chest and moved up and down as he breathed. He said:
‘I say, which do you like best of us all?’
‘Oh, Charlie.... But I like you too.’
‘But not as much as Charlie?’
‘Oh no, not as much as Charlie.’
‘Couldn’t you like me as much?’
‘I don’t think so. I like him better than anyone.’
He sighed. She felt a little sorry for him and said:
‘But I like you next best,’ adding to herself, ‘I don’t think’--a sop to
God, who was always listening. For it was an untruth. Roddy came next,
then Julian, and then Martin. He was so boring and faithful, always
following her round and smelling slightly of perspiration and dirt, and
so entirely under her thumb that he almost had no part in the mysterious
thrillingness of the children next door. She had to think of him in his
detached aspects, running faster than anyone else, or diving for things
at the bottom of the river before he became part of it: or else she had
to remember him with Roddy’s arm flung over his shoulder. That gave him
a glamour. It was thrilling to think of being friends with a
person--especially with Roddy--to that extent. It was no use praying
that Charlie would be willing to walk about like that with her. He would
never dream of it.
Charlie was beautiful as a prince. He was fair and tall with long bright
golden hair that he tossed back from his forehead, and a pale clear
skin. He had a lovely straight white nose, and a girl’s mouth with full
lips slightly apart, and a jutting cleft chin. He kept his shirt collar
unbuttoned, and the base of his throat showed white as a snowdrop. His
knees were very white too. Judith thought of him night and day. At night
she pretended he was in bed beside her; she told him stories and sang
him to sleep: and he said he liked her better than anyone else and would
marry her when they grew up. He went to sleep with a moonbeam across his
brow and she watched over him till morning. He fell into awful dangers
and she rescued him; he had accidents and she carried him for miles
soothing his groans. He was ill and she nursed him, holding his hand
through the worst of the delirium.
He called out: ‘Judith! Judith! Why don’t you come?’ and she answered:
‘I am here, darling,’ and he opened his eyes and recognised her and
whispered, ‘Stay with me,’ and fell into a peaceful refreshing sleep.
And the doctor said, ‘We had all given him up; but your love has pulled
him through.’
Then she fell ill herself, worn out with watching and anxiety. Charlie
came to her and with tears implored her to live that he might show his
gratitude. Sometimes she did; but sometimes she died; and Charlie
dedicated his ruined life to her, tending her grave and weeping daily.
From the bottom of the grave she looked up and saw him pale and
grief-stricken, planting violets.
Nothing in the least like that ever really happened in spite of prayers.
He was quite indifferent.
Once she spent the night next door because Mamma and Papa were away and
Nurse’s mother was going at last. It seemed too exciting to be true, but
it happened. The grandmother said she was Mariella’s little guest, so
Mariella showed her the visitors’ lavatory. Charlie met her coming out
of it, and passed by politely, pretending not to notice. It was a great
pity. She had hoped to appear noble in all her works to him. There was
no chance now. It nearly made the visit a failure.
They had a midnight feast of caramels and banana mess which Julian knew
how to make because he was at Eton; and next morning Charlie did not
come to breakfast and Julian said he had been sick in the night and gone
to Grannie. He was always the one to be sick after things. They went up
to see him, and he was in bed with a basin beside him, flushed and very
cross. He turned to the wall and told them to get out. He spoke to the
grandmother in a whining baby voice and would not let her leave him.
Julian muttered that he was a spoilt sugar-baby and they all went away
again. So the visit was quite a failure. Judith went home pondering.
But next time she saw him he was so beautiful and lordly she had to go
on worshipping. Secretly she recognised his faults, but it was no use:
she had to worship him.
Once they turned out all the lights and played hide and seek. The
darkness in the hall was like crouching enormous black velvet animals.
Suddenly Charlie whispered: ‘Come on, let’s look together;’ and his damp
hand sought hers and clutched it, and she knew he was afraid of the
dark. He pretended he was brave and she the frightened one, but he
trembled and would not let go her hand. It was wonderful, touching and
protecting him in the dark: it made the blackness lose its terrors. When
the lights went on again he was inclined to swagger. But Julian looked
at him with his sharp jeering look. He knew.
Julian and Charlie had terrible quarrels. Julian was always quite quiet:
only his eyes and tongue snapped and bit. He was dreadfully sarcastic.
The quiet things he said lashed and tortured Charlie to screaming
frenzies; and he would give a little dry bit of laugh now and then as
he observed the boiling up of his brother. Once they fought with croquet
mallets on the lawn, and even Mariella was alarmed. And once Charlie
picked up an open penknife and flung it. Julian held his hand up. The
knife was stuck in the palm. He looked at it heavily, and a haggard sick
horror crept over his face and he fainted with a bang on the floor.
Everybody thought he was dead. But the grandmother said ‘Nonsense’ when
Martin went to her and announced the fatality; and she was right. After
she had revived and bandaged him, poor trembling Charlie was sent in to
apologise. Later all the others went in, full of awe and reverence, and
everybody was rather embarrassed. Charlie was a trifle hysterical and
turned somersaults and threw himself about, making noises in his throat.
Everybody giggled a lot with the relief, and Julian was very gentle and
modest on the sofa. After that Julian and Charlie were better friends
and sometimes called each other ‘Old chap.’
Once at a children’s gymkhana that somebody had, Charlie fell down; and
when he saw a trickle of blood on his knee he went white and began to
whimper. He never could bear blood. Some of the gymkhana children looked
mocking and whispered, and Julian came along and told them to shut up,
very fiercely. Then he patted Charlie on the back and said: ‘Buck up,
old chap,’ and put an arm round him and took him up to the house to be
bandaged. Judith watched them going away, pressed close to each other,
the backs of their heads and their thin childish shoulders looking
lonely and pathetic. She thought suddenly: ‘They’ve no Mother and
Father;’ and her throat ached.
Charlie sometimes told you things. Once, after one of the quarrels,
chucking pebbles into the river, he said:
‘It’s pretty rotten Julian and me always quarreling.’
‘But it’s his fault, Charlie.’
‘Oh, I dare say it’s just as much mine.’
Magnanimous Charlie.
‘Oh no, he’s so beastly to you. I think he’s a horrid boy.’
‘Rot! What do you know about it?’ he said indignantly. ‘He’s ripping
and he’s jolly clever too. Much cleverer than me. He thinks I’m an awful
ass.’
‘Oh, you’re not.’
‘Well he thinks so,’ he said gloomily. ‘I expect I am.’
It was terrible to see him so depressed.
‘_I_ don’t think so, Charlie.’ Then fearfully plunging: ‘I wish you were
_my_ brother.’
He hurled a pebble, watched it strike the water, got up to go and said
charmingly:
‘Well, I wish you were my sister.’
And at once it was clear he did not really mean it. He did not care. He
was used to people adoring him, wanting from him what he never gave but
always charmingly pretended to give. It was a deep pang in the heart.
She cried out inwardly: ‘Ah, you don’t mean it!...’ Yet at the same time
there was the melting glow because he had after all said it.
Another time he took a pin out of his coat and said:
‘D’you see what this is?’
‘A pin.’
‘Guess where I found it.’
‘In the seat of your chair.’
The flippancy was misplaced. He ignored it and said impressively:
‘In my pudding at school.’
‘Oh!’
‘I nearly swallowed it.’
‘_Oh!_’
‘If I had I’d ‘a’ died.’
He stared at her.
‘Oh, _Charlie_!...’
‘You can keep it if you like.’
He was so beautiful, so gracious, so munificent that words failed....
She put the pin in a sealed envelope and wrote on it. “The pin that
nearly killed C.F.” with the date; and laid it away in the washstand
drawer with her will and a bit of uncut turquoise, and some shells, and
a piece of bark from the poplar tree that fell down in the garden. After
that she was a good deal encouraged to hope he might marry her.
Sometimes Charlie and Mariella looked alike--clear, bloodlessly cool;
and they both adored dogs and talked a special language to them. But
Charlie was all nerve, vulnerable, easy to trouble; and Mariella seemed
quite impervious. They disliked each other. He thought she despised him,
and it made him nag and try to score off her. Yet they had this subtle
likeness.
Sometimes Charlie played the piano for hours. He and Julian remembered
tunes in their heads and could play them correctly even if they had only
heard them whistled once. If one could not remember a bar, the other
could: they supplemented each other. It was thrilling to hear them. They
were wrapped in shining mists of glory. When Charlie sang Christmas
carols his voice was heart-breakingly sweet and he looked like the
little choir boy, too saintly, too blue-eyed to live,--which made Judith
anxious. The grandmother used to wipe her eyes when he sang, and say to
Judith, just as if she had been grown up, that he was the image of his
dear father.
The grandmother did not love Julian in the same way, though sometimes in
the evening she would stroke his rough stormy-looking head as he lay on
the floor, and say very pityingly: ‘Poor old boy.’ He used to shut his
eyes tight when she said it, and let himself be stroked for a minute,
then jerk away. He always did things twice as vehemently as other
people. He never shut his eyes without screwing them up. At first you
thought he was just beastly, but later you found he was pathetic as well
and knew why she said: ‘Poor old boy’ with that particular inflection.
Later still you varied hating him with almost loving him.
Judith was the only one he never mocked at. She was quite immune. He did
not always take notice of her, of course, being at Eton, and she much
younger; but when he did, he was always kindly--even interested; so that
it seemed unjust to dislike him so much, except for Charlie’s sake.
He was an uncomfortable person. If you had been alone with him it was a
relief to get back to the others. His senses were too acute, his mind
too angular. He would not let anything alone. He was always prying and
poking restlessly, testing and examining, and making you do the same,
insistently holding your attention as long as he wanted it, so that his
company was quite exhausting. He always hoped to find people more
intelligent, more interesting than they were, and he would not let them
alone till he had discovered their inadequacy and thrown them away.
But the more he poked at a person’s mind, the more that person withdrew.
He had that knack. He spent his time doing himself no good, repelling
where he hoped to attract. He was of a didactical turn of mind. He loved
instructing; and he knew so much about his subjects and was so anxious
to impart all he knew that he would go on and on and on. It was very
tiresome. Judith was too polite to show her boredom, so she got a lot of
instruction. Sometimes he tried when they were alone together to make
her tell him her thoughts, which would have been terribly embarrassing
but that he soon lost interest in them and turned to his own. He himself
had a great many thoughts which he threw at her pell mell. He had
contemptuous ideas about religion. He had just become an unbeliever, and
he said ‘God’ in quite an ordinary unashamed conversational voice.
Sometimes she understood his thoughts, or pretended to, to save the
explanation, and sometimes she let him explain, because it made him so
pleased and enthusiastic. He would contort himself all over with agony
searching for the right, the perfect words in which to express himself,
and if he was satisfied at the end he hummed a little tune. He loved
words passionately: he invented very good ones. Also he made the most
screamingly funny monstrous faces to amuse them all, if he felt
cheerful. Generally however, he was morose when they were all together,
and went away alone, looking as if he despised and distrusted them.
Judith discovered he did not really prefer to be alone: he liked one
other person, a listener. It made him light up impetuously and talk and
talk. The others thought him conceited, and he was; yet all the time he
was less conceited than self-abasing and sensitive, less overbearing
than diffident. He could not laugh at himself, only at others; and he
never forgave a person who laughed at him.
He told untruths to a disconcerting extent. Judith told a great many
herself, so she was very quick to detect his, and always extremely
shocked. Once the grandmother said:
‘Who broke the punt pole?’
And they all said:
‘I didn’t.’
Then she said patiently:
‘Well, who went punting yesterday?’ And Martin, red and anxious with his
desire to conceal nothing cried joyfully: ‘I did.’--adding almost with
disappointment: ‘But I didn’t break the pole.’ His truthfulness was
quite painfully evident. Nobody had broken the pole.
Julian whistled carelessly for a bit after that, so Judith knew.
Sometimes he invented dreams, pretending he had really dreamt them.
Judith always guessed when the dreams were untruths, though often they
were very clever and absurd, just like real dreams. She made up dreams
too, so he could not deceive her. She knew the recipe for the game; and
that, try as you would, some betraying touch was bound to creep in.
In the same way he could not deceive her about the adventures he had
had, the queer people he had met, plausible as they were. Made-up people
were real enough, but only in their own worlds, which were each as
different from the world your body lived in as the people who made them
were different from each other. The others always believed him when they
bothered to listen; they had not the imagination to find him out. Judith
as a fellow artist was forced to judge his lies intellectually, in spite
of moral indignation.
He was rather mean about sweets. Often he bought a bagful of acid drops,
and after handing them round once went away and finished them by
himself. Sometimes when Judith was with him he sucked away and never
once said: ‘Have one.’ But another time he bought her eightpence worth
all to herself and took her for a beetle walk. He adored beetles. He
knew their names in Latin, and exactly how many thousand eggs a minute
they laid and what they ate, and where and how long they lived. Coming
back he put his arm round her and she was proud, though she wished he
were Charlie.
He read a lot and sometimes he was secretive about it. He stayed in the
bath room whole afternoons reading dictionaries or the Arabian Nights.
He was the only one who was said to know for certain how babies were
born. When the others aired their theories he laughed in a superior way.
Then one day after they had all been persuading him he said, surly and
brief: ‘Well, haven’t you noticed animals, idiots?’ And after they had
consulted amongst themselves a bit they all thought they understood,
except Martin, and Marietta had to explain to him.
Julian played the piano better than Charlie; he played so that it was
impossible not to listen. But he was not, as Charlie was, a pure vessel
for receiving music and pouring it forth again. Judith thought Charlie
undoubtedly lapped up music as a kitten lapped milk.
Julian said privately that he intended to write an opera. It was too
thrilling for words. He had already composed a lovely thing called
‘Spring’ with trills, and an imitation of a cuckoo recurring in it. It
was wonderful,--exactly like a real cuckoo. Another composition was
called ‘The Dance of the Stag-Beetles.’ That was very funny. You simply
saw the stag-beetles lumping solemnly round. It made everybody
laugh--even the grandmother. Then Roddy invented a dance for it which
was as funny as the music; and it became a regular thing to be done on
rainy days. Julian himself preferred ‘Spring.’ He said it was a bigger
thing altogether.
* * * * *
Roddy was the queerest little boy. He was the most unreal and thrilling
of all because he was there so rarely. His parents were not dead like
Julian’s and Charlie’s, or abroad like Martin’s or divorced and
disgraced like Mariella’s. (Mariella’s mother had run away with a
Russian Pole, whatever that was, when Mariella was a baby; and after
that her father ... there Nurse had broken off impressively and tilted
an imaginary bottle to her lips when she was whispering about it to the
housemaid.)
Roddy’s parents lived in London and allowed him to come on a week’s
visit once every holiday. Roddy scarcely ever spoke. He had a pale, flat
secret face and yellow-brown eyes with a twinkling light remote at the
back of them. He had a ruffled dark shining head and a queer smile that
you watched for because it was not like anyone else’s. His lip lifted
suddenly off his white teeth and then turned down at the corners in a
bitter-sweet way. When you saw it you said ‘Ah!’ to yourself, with a
little pang, and stared,--it was so queer. He had a trick of spreading
out his hands and looking at them,--brown broad hands with long crooked
fingers that were magical when they held a pencil and could draw
anything. He had another trick of rubbing his eyes with his fist like a
baby, and that made you say ‘Ah!’ too, with a melting, quick sort of
pang, wanting to touch him. His eyes fluttered in a strong light: they
were weak and set so far apart that, with their upward sweep, they
seemed to go round the corners and, seen in profile, to be set in his
head like a funny bird’s. He reminded you of something fabulous--a
Chinese fairy-story. He was thin and odd and graceful; and there was a
suggestion about him of secret animals that go about by night.
Once Judith saw a hawthorn hedge in winter, shining darkly with recent
rain. Deep in the heart of its strong maze of twigs moved a shadowy
bird pecking, darting silently about in its small mysterious confined
loneliness after a glowing berry or two. Suddenly Judith thought of
Roddy. It was ridiculous of course, but there it was: the suggestion
came of itself with the same queer pull of surprise and tenderness. A
noiseless, intent creature moving alone among small brilliancies in a
profound maze: there was--oh, what was there that was all of Roddy in
that?
He was so elastic, so mercurial in his movements, when he chose, that he
did not seem true. He had a way of swinging down from the topmost branch
of a tree, dropping lightly, hand below hand, as if he were floating
down, and then, long before he reached the usual jumping-place, giving
himself easily to the air and landing in a soft relaxed cat-like crouch.
Once they set out to attempt the huge old fir-tree at the edge of the
garden. The thing was to get to the top before someone below counted
fifty. Julian, Mariella, Martin tried, and failed. Then Roddy. He swung
himself up and soon after leapt out from a branch and came down again,
pronouncing it too uncomfortable and filthy to be bothered about. Judith
looked up and saw the wild swirl of twigs so thick all the way up that
no sky showed through. She said to herself: ‘I will! I will!’ and the
Spirit entered in to her and she climbed to the top and threw a
handkerchief out of it just as Martin said fifty-seven. After that she
came down again, and received congratulations. Martin gave her his lucky
thripenny as a prize, and she was swollen with pride because she, the
youngest, had beaten them all; and in her exaltation she thought: ‘I can
do anything if I say I can,’ and tried again that evening to fly through
the power of faith but failed.
Afterwards when she was resavouring in secret the sweet applause they
had given her she remembered that Roddy had said nothing,--just looked
at her with twinkling eyes and a bit of his downward smile; and she
thought he had probably been laughing at her for her enthusiasm and her
pride. She felt disillusioned, and all at once remembered her bruises
and her ruined bloomers.
Roddy had no ambition. He did not feel at all humiliated if he failed to
meet a challenge. If he did not want to try he did not try: not because
he was afraid of failing, for he knew his power and so did everyone
else; and not because he was physically cautious, for fear was unknown
to him: it was because of the fundamental apathy in him. He lived in
bursts of energy followed by the most lethargic indifference.
When he chose to lead they all followed; but he did not care. He did not
care whether he was liked or not. He never sought out Martin, though he
accepted his devotion kindly and did not join in the sells arranged for
him. But then he never joined in anything: he was not interested in
personal relationships.
They were all a little afraid of him, and none of them--except Martin to
whom he was as a son--liked him very much.
The things he drew were extremely odd: long dream-like figures with thin
legs trailing after them, giants and pigmies and people having their
heads cut off, and ghosts and skeletons rising from graves and flapping
after children; and people doing wild dances, their limbs flying about;
and amusing monsters and hideous terrifying old women. His caricatures
were the best. The grandmother said they were very promising. Julian was
always the most successful subject, and he minded dreadfully.
Sometimes Judith sat beside him and watched his quick pencil. It was
like magic. But always he soon gave up. He had scarcely any interest in
his drawings once they were finished. She collected them in sheaves and
took them home to gloat over. That he could execute such things and that
she should be privileged to observe and to gather up after him!... His
drawings were more thrilling even than the music of Julian and Charlie.
She could play the piano herself quite nicely, but as for
drawing,--there was another clear case of the unreliability of the
Bible. However much you cried: ‘I can, I can!’ and rushed, full of
faith, to pencil and paper, nothing whatever happened.
Once she was suddenly emboldened and said out loud the words rehearsed
silently for many weeks,
‘Now draw something for _me_, Roddy.’
Oh, something designed from its conception for your very own,--something
which could be labelled (by yourself, since Roddy would certainly
refuse) ‘From the artist to Judith Earle,’ with the date: a token, a
perpetual memorial of his friendship!...
‘Oh no,’ said Roddy, ‘I can’t.’ He threw down his pencil, instantly
bored at the suggestion, smiled and presently wandered off.
The smile took the edge off the sting, but there was an old feeling, an
oppression, as she watched him going away. It was no use trying to bring
Roddy out of his labyrinthine seclusion with personal advances and
pretensions to favouritism. Roddy had a power to wound far beyond his
years; he seemed grown up sometimes in his crushingness.
Now and again he was very funny and invented dances on the lawn to make
them laugh. His imitation of a Russian ballet-dancer was wonderful. Also
he could walk on his hands or do backward somersaults into the water.
This was very thrilling and made him highly respected.
Once he and Judith were the two hares in a paper chase. Roddy spied an
old umbrella in the hedge and picked it up. It was tattered and gaunt
and huge; and there was something friendly about it,--a disreputable
reckless jollity. He carried it for a long time, swinging it round and
round, and sometimes balancing it on his chin or spearing things with
it. At the top of the hill they came to the pond covered with green
stuff and a white starry froth of flowers. All around grew flags and
forget-me-nots, and the hundred other rare enchanting trivialities of
watery places.
‘Well, I don’t want this old umbrella,’ said Roddy. He considered the
water. ‘Do you?’
‘No. Throw it away.’
He flung it. It alighted in the middle of the pond. It stuck--oh,
horror!--upright, caught in something, and refused to sink.
‘Oh, Roddy!’
It stared at them across the waste of waters, stark, forlorn,
reproachful. It said: ‘Why did you pick me up, encourage and befriend me
when this is what you meant to do?’
‘Well, come on,’ said Roddy.
They fled from it.
They fled from it, but ah!--it pursued them. From miles away it wailed
to Judith in a high thin squeak: ‘Save me! Save me!’ They made excuses
to each other for spoiling the paper chase, and going back the same way.
Their feet were compelled, driven.
The pond lay fair and flawless in the evening light. The umbrella was
drowned.
Roddy stood at the edge and bit his lip. He said:
‘Well, I almost wish I hadn’t thrown the poor old chap away.’
She nodded. She could not speak.
The place was haunted for ever.
But what remained more deeply in her memory was the bond with Roddy, the
sharing of an emotion, the secret sympathy. Avidly she seized upon it,
and with it nourished her immoderate ambitions. One day they would all
like her better than anyone else: even Roddy would tell her every thing.
Their lives, instead of being always remote and mysterious would revolve
intimately round her. She would know all, all about them.
* * * * *
From that far off unsubstantial time Roddy’s face was the last, the
clearest, the strangest to float up.
There was a field with chalky pits in it and ripening blackberries and
wastes of gorse and bracken. The curious smell of the bracken rose
faint but penetrating, earthy and yet unreal, disturbing.
She was staring in horror at a dead rabbit lying in the path. It was
stretched on its side with its tiny frail-boned paws laid out quiet, and
the tender secret white fur of its underneath half revealed. One of
them--which?--she could never remember--said:
‘Well, I never thought I’d touch it.’
It was like hearing a person speak in a bad dream.
‘How did you do it?’ said Roddy’s voice.
‘Well, it was sitting, and I crept up and chucked a stone to startle it
up, not meaning to hurt it. But I must have hit it plumb behind the
ear,--I killed it outright anyway. It was an absolute fluke. I couldn’t
do it again if I tried all my life.’
‘Hum,’ said Roddy. ‘Funny thing.’
He stood with his hands in his pockets looking down at the corpse,
making his face a mask. The sun wavered and darkened. The surface of the
bracken shone with a metallic light, the grass was lurid, the trees
hissed. Judith struggled in a nightmare.
‘Well, what shall I do with it?’ said someone.
‘I’ll see to it,’ said Roddy.
Then he and she were alone. She bent down and touched the fur. It was
dead, it was dead. She fell on her knees beside it and wept.
‘I say, _don’t_,’ said Roddy after a bit. He could not bear tears.
She wept all the more, awful sobs from the pit of the stomach.
‘He didn’t mean it, it can’t be helped,’ said Roddy. Then after another
interval:
‘You know, it didn’t feel it. It died at once.’
It died at once. Oh, how pathetic, how unbearable.... Then again, after
a long time:
‘Look, we’ll take it home and give it a funeral.’
He gathered huge fern-leaves and gently wrapped the rabbit in them. She
picked it up: she would carry it, though she almost fainted with anguish
at the feel of its tender thin body. She thought: ‘I am holding
something that’s dead. It was alive a few minutes ago and now it’s--what
is it?’--and she felt choked, drowning.
They set off. Weeping, weeping she carried the rabbit down the hill into
the garden; and Roddy walked silently beside her. He went away and dug a
hole under a laurel bush in the thickest part of the shrubbery. But when
it came to the final act, the burying, she could not bear it at all. She
was beyond all coherence now, a welter of sobs and tears.
‘I say, _don’t_,’ said Roddy again in a shaking voice.
She was suddenly quiet with shock; for he sounded on the verge of
breaking down. He could not endure her grief. Out of the corner of a
sodden eye she saw his face start to break up. Quickly she yielded the
body, and he took it away.
He was gone a long time. When he came back he took her arm and said:
‘Come and look.’
Under the laurel bush, at the head of the little mound he had set up a
beautiful tablet. It was the top of a cake tin, smooth and clean and
shining; and on it he had hammered out with a nail the words: ‘In memory
of a Rabbit.’
Peace and comfort flowed in upon her....
The rabbit was under all that quiet and green gloom, under the chill
stiff polished moulding of the great laurel leaves, no longer terrible
and pathetic, but dignified with its memorial tablet, lapped in the kind
protecting earth, out of reach of flies and boys and the mocking stare
of the sun. It was all right. There was not any sorrow.
‘Oh, Roddy!’
He had done it to please her. Charlie would not have done it, Martin
could not have. It was a purely Roddy gesture, so unlike him, you would
have supposed, and yet, when it was done, so recognisably his gesture
and only his. Incalculable Roddy! She remembered how when Martin had
sprained his ankle and moaned, he had hovered round him in distress,
with a puckered face. He could not stand the unhappiness and pain of
people.
She wanted to kiss him, and did not dare. She looked at him, the whole
of herself flowing towards him in a warm tumult of gratitude, and
quickly touched his arm; and he looked back, withdrawing himself for
fear of thanks, smiling his obscure downward smile. She thought: ‘Shall
I never, never understand him?’
She saw the sky beginning to blossom with evening. The sun came out
below flushed clouds and all the treetops were lit up, sombrely floating
and rocking in a dark gold wash of light. Across the river the fields
looked rich and wistful, brimming with sun, cut with long violet
shadows. The river ran a little wildly, scattered over with fierce,
fire-opal flakes. But all was softening, flattering. The clouds were
drifting away, the wind was quiet now; there would be an evening as
still, as carved as death.
She saw it all with the quivering overclear senses of exhaustion. It was
too much. Roddy’s pale face was all at once significant, and all the
others, even Charlie, floated away while she looked at him and loved
him. And as she looked she saw the deep light falling on him and he
seemed mingled with the whole mysterious goldenness of the evening, to
be part of it; and she felt herself lost with him in a sudden dark
poignant intimacy and merging,--a lifting flood, all come and gone in a
timeless moment.
* * * * *
But afterwards it did not seem true. She only remembered that next time
she saw him he had been quite ordinary and indifferent, and she herself,
still looking for signs and wonders, chilled with disappointment. Roddy
as a child grew dim after that; and the rabbit’s grave that she had
meant to tend and keep sweet with flowers through the changing seasons,
grew dim too. After a while she could not even remember exactly where it
was in all that shrubbery. The rabbit lay forgotten.
The others faded too. She could recapture nothing more of them. They
were cut off sharp in a final group on the hillside, as if horror had in
that instant made a night and blotted them out for good.
Then the grandmother let the house and went away to seek a less damp air
for her rheumatism. Being alone came again as the natural stuff of life,
and the children next door were gone and lost, as if they had never
been.
2
Then they came again--straying so suddenly, strangely, briefly across
the timeless confusions of adolescence, that they left behind them an
even more disturbing sense of their unreality,--an estrangement
profounder than before.
It was winter--the time of the long frost and the ten days’
skating,--the time when crossing the river to get to the skating pool
was dangerous because of the great blocks of ice coming down with the
stream. Those ten days flashed out for ever in life,--a sparkling pure
breathless intoxication of movement and light and air that seemed each
evening too delightful to be allowed to last; and yet each succeeding
morning--she first listening to the day then fearfully peeping at
it--had miraculous prolongation. She prayed: _Oh God, let the skating
last. Let me skate. Take not my happiness from me and I will love Thee
as I ought._ And for ten days He hearkened unto her.
Each day she abandoned lessons and, crossing the river, ran across the
crunching frost-bound marsh to the edge of the pond. Over and over it
the people slipped, glided, swirled with shouts of laughter in the sun.
Their lips were parted, their eyes shone, they were beautified.
She wore a white sweater and a crimson muffler. At first people looked
at her and then they began smiling at her; and soon she was greeting all
those who came regularly and smiling at fresh strangers every day.
There was a girl who came each morning from the London train. She was
slender and fair, and she skated with the flying grace of a dream. Her
pleated skirt swung out as she moved, her feet in their trim boots were
narrow and small, and when she twirled her long slim legs showed to the
knee. She appeared like a goddess in the midst of the cheerful sociable
incompetent herd. Judith skated to and fro in front of her every day,
hoping in vain for a look; for she was proud and absorbed and ardent,
holding herself aloof and noticing no one, skating and skating till it
got dark. One day she brought a handsome young man with her, and to him
was not at all proud and indifferent.
They waltzed, they spun, they cut figures, they ran hand in hand, they
laughed at each other; and when they rested they sat side by side
talking and smoking cigarettes. Unlike his companion, the young man
looked at Judith not once but many times: and then he smiled at her;
then he whispered something to the goddess, and Judith’s heart beat
wildly. But the cold scornful creature merely glanced once in a bored
way, nodding and went on skating. When evening fell and they were
preparing to go he looked up from taking off his boots as Judith passed,
and radiantly smiling with white teeth and blue eyes, said ‘Good night.’
That was, to her regret, the only time she saw this handsome and
friendly young man, whose wife she would have been pleased to be.
There was an old gentleman with glasses and a grey moustache who skated
very sedately and who took a great deal of trouble to teach her the
outside edge. He called her ‘my dear’, and his eyes gazed at her from
behind his glasses with a hungry watery wistfulness. He had little if
any conversation, but he would clear his throat and open his mouth as he
looked at her as if for ever on the verge of some tremendous confidence.
There was also a common but polite boy with pimples who could skate very
fast indeed and who for several afternoons raced panting up and down the
ice, while she hung on to the belt of his Norfolk jacket, and shrieked.
The tenth morning was Saturday. The London train brought several
parties. The goddess had a little girl with her. There were many vulgar
shouting groups of incompetents, and one or two quiet and moderately
proficient ones. Judith noticed a curious trio of tall slender refined
looking people--two boys and a girl. They sat on the bank and slowly ate
sandwiches. When they had finished they got up and stood grouped
together, making no movement to adjust the skates they carried. As soon
as they stood up, Judith recognized them: Mariella, Julian and Charlie.
It had happened.
They had not changed much, but they had grown most alarmingly. Mariella
must be close on six foot. Her body had merely been stretched out
without much alteration of the long vague curves of childhood. She
hardly dared look at the boys: they were enormous.
That was Charlie, really Charlie, that yellow-headed one, a little
wild-looking, more beautiful than ever.... She felt choked.
At that moment Mariella’s eyes fell on her. A fearful blush and
heart-beating went all through her, and she turned hastily away. But she
could feel them observing, questioning, conferring about her. She
executed a perfect half-circle on the outside edge, and felt that now,
if they did recognise her, she could just bear it.
Somebody was calling from the edge.
‘Hey! Hey! Hi!’
She looked round cautiously. There was no doubt about it. Charlie was
calling her, and they were all nodding and beckoning. They could, it
seemed, easily bear to recognize her, and the sight of her skating
towards them caused them no apparent faintness or anguish.
Charlie said rather peevishly:
‘I say, how do you _do_ it? That turn thing. Who taught you?’
Judith was dumb.
‘She doesn’t recognize us,’ said Mariella with a little giggle. ‘You
_are_ Judith Earle, aren’t you?’
‘Oh yes. Oh, I _do_. Only you’ve grown so.’ She tried to look at them
and to her horror felt the tears smart under her eyelids. ‘I didn’t
expect----’ Her mouth was trembling, and she stopped in despair,
hanging her head.
It was such a shock, such a deep pang of joy and misery.... They would
not understand.... After all these years of thinking about them, seeing
them so passionately, nursing in her imagination their unreal and
dream-like existence, that they should all at once quite casually be
there! It was almost as if dead people were to come to life. She prayed
to be swallowed up in the ice.
‘Well, you’re no pigmy,’ said Julian.
And they all laughed. Then it was all right. They ceased to swell and
waver before her eyes, settled down, began to grow real.
‘Well, I don’t know how it’s done,’ said Charlie, still rather angrily
looking at the ice. ‘Mariella, what on earth did you drag us here for?
You don’t know any more than I do how it’s done. What a stupid waste of
a day!’ The stress of his petulance made his voice, which was breaking,
squeak suddenly now and then, in the funniest way, so that nobody could
have taken him seriously.
‘Well, you needn’t have come.’ Mariella’s voice was still cool and
childish. With her little smile, she turned away from him to watch the
skaters.
‘And my feet are so cold I can’t feel them,’ went on Charlie. ‘Three
great gawps, that’s what we are, three great gawps.’ He looked at
Mariella’s back. ‘And Mariella’s _easily_ the gawpest.’
That seemed to unburden him, for he suddenly threw off his bad temper
and laughed.
‘Put on your skates, chaps,’ he said. ‘We’ll do our damndest.’
He began to whistle and sat down, struggling with his boots.
‘Judith shall show us how it’s done. She is so _extremely_ able.’ He
looked at her, giving her his attention for the first time, and
charmingly smiled. His eyes were amazing when they looked full at
you--brilliant, icy-blue, a little too wide open. His long red girlish
lips still parted a trifle in repose; and the whole head had a
breath-taking extravagance of beauty.
‘How are you, Judith?’ he said. ‘Do you remember the dear old days?’
‘Yes, I do.’
What self-possession he had! She was not up to him. He lost interest in
her, and went on with his boots, fiercely whistling.
‘Do you really still live here, Judith?’ said Mariella.
‘Yes, really. Where do you live?’
‘Well, we’re in London now. Grannie moved there to be near my school.
Where do you go to school?’
‘I don’t. I have classes by myself with a man who coaches boys for
Oxford and Cambridge. He’s a vicar. And then I have music lessons from a
person who comes from London, and Daddy teaches me Greek and Latin. My
Mother and Father don’t believe in girl’s schools.’ That sounded rude
and priggish. She blushed and added. ‘But I do. It’s awfully dull by
myself.’
‘Why don’t you get your Mother to send you to my school?’ said Mariella.
‘It’s ripping fun. You could come up to London every day.’
‘Mariella _loves_ her school,’ said Julian. ‘It’s _topping_. She doesn’t
learn _anything_ and plays hockey _all_ day. Judith’s parents want her
to be _educated_, Mariella. You don’t understand. Isn’t that so,
Judith?’
Judith blushed again and was afraid it was so.
‘I believe in female education,’ muttered Julian to his boots.
They had become extremely queer creatures as they grew up, thought
Judith. The boys especially were very peculiar, with their height and
pallor and their trick of over-emphatic speech. Julian was immensely
tall and cadaverous, with a stormy, untidy, hideous face, and eloquent
eyes that seemed always to be changing colour in their deep sockets. He
actually had lines in his cheeks, and his nose was becoming hooked, with
dilated, back-sweeping nostrils.
‘Well, I wish you’d come,’ said Mariella unruffled, after a silence.
‘It’s ripping. You’d love it.’
It was nice of Mariella to be so friendly and pressing. Perhaps she had
always been very fond of you, had missed you.... Judith’s heart warmed.
‘I wish _you’d_ come back and live here, Mariella. It was so lovely when
you did.’
‘I’d like to,’ said Mariella complacently. ‘P’raps we will some day. If
Grannie’s rheumatism would only get better we might come every summer.’
‘But it never will get better,’ said Julian. ‘Not at her age.’
The boots were all on at last, the skates fastened. They got up and
wobbled out a few inches on to the ice. There was a chorus of ‘Hell!’
‘Wow!’ ‘Goodness!’
Charlie slipped up with a crash, Mariella followed him.
‘It’s beastly,’ he said furiously. ‘You can’t keep your skates still. I
think I’ve broken my wrist. I shall go home.’ The others took no notice.
They wobbled further and further out, giggling. They were too tall and
thin to balance properly, and their ankles kept on betraying them.
‘Come and help us, Judith,’ screamed Julian. ‘We’ve never skated before
in our _lives_. We can’t _stop_. We’re too thin to be allowed to fall
down.’
They were dragging each other on helplessly.
‘Come _here_,’ wailed Charlie. ‘Judith, come and help me to stand.
Shan’t we fall in? Are you sure it’s safe? My feet are _frozen_.’
Judith giggled as she went from one to the other encouraging,
admonishing, supporting. The three ridiculous sillies! They enjoyed
their silliness, they enjoyed making her laugh, they were not a bit
frightening after all. Never, never since she had bidden them good-bye
years ago had been such warm and bubbling happiness. Everything
delightful was really starting at last.
As they began to improve they became ambitious. They declared their
desire to learn fancy skating, and Charlie swore he would cut a figure
of eight before the day was out; and all the time they were simply no
good at all. Out of the corner of an eye Judith saw the old gentleman
and the boy in the Norfolk jacket wistfully looking on, and she ignored
them.
‘Now, come along Mariella,’ said Charlie. ‘Take hands like this,
crossed, and we’ll go for a glide.’ They sailed rather haltingly away.
Under Mariella’s blue wool cap the dark short hair curled softly upwards
now, longer than the boyish crop of yore. Her face had preserved its
pure and innocent mask. She was laughing, not as other people laughed,
unreservedly in the enjoyment of physical pleasures, but rather as if
she were making a concession to Charlie’s mood, and found the
abandonment of laughter alien to her. There was still the curious
likeness between the two clear bloodless faces, though Charlie’s was
forever changing with quick emotions and Mariella’s was still, empty
almost. They would understand each other, thought Judith. In spite of
the friction that used to go on between them, they had always been more
obviously, more oppressively blood-relations than any other members of
the circle. With years the bond had become even more subtly defined.
Julian was left out. He had never taken any notice of Mariella, yet he
had always been the one upon whom her light gaze had dwelt with a faint
difference, as if it meant to dwell. In the old days it had sometimes
seemed as if she would have been pleased--really pleased, not just
indifferently agreeable as she generally was--if Julian had offered to
take her for a beetle-walk. She appeared to have a slight respectful
interest in him, and a manner which suggested, though only to a
remorseless watcher, that she would have valued his good opinion. It
still seemed so. When he was teasing her about her school, her eyes,
uncertain yet dwelling, had fallen on him a moment; but now, as
formerly, you could detect no affection between them.
‘We wondered if we should meet you,’ said Julian shyly. ‘I’m so glad we
did.’
Then they had not completely forgotten. She blessed him for the
assurance, which only he would have given.
‘I couldn’t believe it was you,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think I’d ever see
you again. I did miss you after you went. I thought perhaps Martin might
write to me, but he didn’t. How is Martin?’
‘He’s all right. We don’t see him so much now. His people are back from
Africa and he spends most of the holidays with them.’ He smiled and
added: ‘I remember Martin was terribly devoted to you. I must tell him
I’ve seen you.’
‘And where’s Roddy?’
‘Oh, Roddy.... He’s all right. He’s in London. Roddy’s very grown up:
he’s having dancing lessons.’ Julian snorted.
‘Does he still draw?’
‘I don’t know. Should think he’s too lazy.’
Julian had never liked Roddy.
‘Do you still compose, Julian?’
‘Oh, do you remember that?’ He smiled with pleasure.
‘Of course. The “Stag-Beetles” Dance. And “Spring with the Cuckoo in
it.”’
‘Oh, that rot. Fancy your remembering!’ He looked at her in just the old
way, amused but interested, thinking well of her.
‘I thought it was beautiful. Have you written anything lately?’
‘No. No time. I’ve given it all up. I’ve been working like mad for a
scholarship. P’raps I’ll take to it again a bit at Oxford.’
He seemed to have become enthusiastic about it all at once, encouraged
by her interest. He had not changed much.
‘And did you get your scholarship?’
‘Yes. Balliol. I go up next year.’ He was being brief and modest,
actually blushing. But Balliol meant nothing to her: she was thinking of
his great age.
‘You must be eighteen.’
‘Yes.’
‘D’you know, I remember all your birthdays.’
As she said it she almost cried again, it seemed such a confession of
long-cherished vain hope and love. He stared at her, ready to be amused,
and then, seeing her face, looked away suddenly, as if he
half-understood and were astonished, embarrassed, touched.
‘Oh, look at those two,’ he said quickly.
Charlie had taken off his coat, and they were holding it up as a sail.
With a pang of dismay Judith realized for the first time the ominous
strength of the wind. It filled the coat full, and Mariella and Charlie,
bearing it high in front of them, went sailing straight across the pond.
They could not stop. They shrieked in laughter and agony and went ever
faster. They were borne to the pond’s edge, stubbed their skates and
fell violently in a heap on the grass.
Charlie lay on his back and moaned.
‘I’ve got a pain. I’ve got a pain. Oh, Mariella! Oh, God! Oh,
all you people! The anguish, the _sensation_!--like the Scenic
Railway--transports of horror and bliss. I thought: Never, _never_ shall
we stop. We went faster, and fas.... Oh, Mariella, your _face_.... I
shall _die_....’
He writhed with laughter, the tears poured down his face. ‘I t-_tried_
to say: _drop_ the c---- I hadn’t any _voice_--Oh, what a _feeling_!...
those skimming dreams.... O God!’
He shut his eyes exhausted.
Then soon he had to try again. Then they all tried, and were a nuisance
to the other skaters. Every one looked at Charlie, and nobody was
annoyed because of his beauty and radiant spirits, and his charming
apologies when he got in the way.
Judith ached with giggling; even Mariella and Julian were wiping their
eyes. Charlie was so excited that he looked quite feverish. In his
enthusiasm he threw his arms wide and cried:
‘Oh, darlings!’--and Judith was thrilled because she felt herself
included in the endearment.
‘You know,’ said Julian, ‘you’ll be sick to-night, Charlie, if you go on
like this.’
So he was still the one to be sick.
A small cold mongrel dog came shivering, wriggling across the ice and
rolled over before him, waving limp deprecatory paws. Charlie picked it
up and wrapped it in his coat, crooning to it and kissing it.
‘Oh, what sweet paws you have, my chap. Mariella, his paws are
particularly heart-breaking. Do look,--all blunt and tufted and
uncontrolled. Don’t they melt you? Poor chap,--darling chap. You come
along with me for a skate.’
He skated away with the dog in his arms, talking his special foolish
language to it, and colliding with people at every other step.
Oh, he was strange, thought Judith, looking after him. She had no key to
him: she could only dissect him and make notes, learn him by heart and
marvel at him,--never hope to meet him some day suddenly, at a chance
look, a trifling word, with that secret “Ah!”--that shock of inmost
mysterious recognition, as she had once met Roddy.
She thought of Roddy dancing in London, urban and alarming. She saw him
distinctly, his dark head, his yellowish pallor, his smile; and wished
wildly that he had come instead of Charlie: Charlie who troubled her,
made her heavy-hearted with the burden of his lavish indifferent
brilliance.
The sharp, blue and white afternoon was paling to sunset. The pond
flashed and glittered with empty light. In the middle rose the clump of
withered flags, dry starved grasses and marsh plants, berried bushes and
little willows,--the whole a blur of pastel shades, purplish-brown,
fading green, yellow and russet, with here and there a burning shred of
isolated colour,--a splash of crimson, a streak of gold. The whirr and
scratch of skates murmured on the air, and the skaters wove without
pause, swiftly, lightly, like flies on a ceiling. Beneath the ice the
needling grass-blades and the little water-weeds were still, spellbound;
outspread stiffly, delicately in multitudinous and infinitesimal
loveliness.
As she stood alone gazing down at them Julian came back to her side and
said:
‘Do you ever come to London?’
‘Hardly ever. If Daddy’s at home he generally takes me to a theatre at
Christmas; and now and then I go with Mamma for clothes.’
‘Well, you’d better come up some time soon and we’ll go to a play. Fix
it with Mariella.’
‘Oh!’
It couldn’t be true,--it could never happen. There was a scratch and
stumble of skates, and the other two came to a wavering halt in front of
them.
‘We must go,’ said Mariella.
‘Judith’s coming to go to a play with us,’ said Julian.
‘Oh, good,’ said Mariella, not interested.
‘When?’ snapped Julian. ‘Fix it.’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, with a quick glance at him. ‘We must ask
Grannie. I’ll ask Grannie, Judith, and let you know to-morrow.’
‘Because we’re coming back to-morrow,’ broke in Charlie. ‘Julian, we
must, mustn’t we? Will you be here, Judith?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘That’s good, because I shall need you. I need thee every hour. I shall
have forgotten my breast-stroke by to-morrow. I do believe if we hadn’t
found you, Judith, we should never have stepped on to the ice at all. We
should just have looked at it and faded gracefully back to London. We
are so _very_ silly.’
He sat down to take off his boots, and began whistling--then burst out
singing:
‘There were three sillies
Who stood like lilies----’