Authors: Unknown
Unknown (47 page)
From that fragment of white mystery there slid across land and water into the soul of Sam Dekker a thin, long-rippling confederate stream of sweet disturbance. Where John Crow would have subtly reasoned upon the mythical significance of this frail vessel of '"furious fancies,1' Sam just gave himself up to its palpable power. He became a wave in the Bristol Channel, a bracken-frond in the Quantock hills, a crystal in a Mendip stone wall, a black-striped perch in the Brue under Pomparles Bridge. Sam and that old bent pollard, whose youthful sprouts he was clutching with such blind intensity, gave themselves up together so completely to the power of that obscured moon that an identical magnetism poured through the man's flesh and blood and shivered through the vegetable fibres of the tree. Yes! Sam felt as if he were a reckless rider, awkward and stiff, in his new release, but mounted on the dark equine back and behind the streaming mane of the revolving earth; and carried wildly through the wet mists towards his desire. He little knew what superhuman Naturalists were watching him then, as interested in his present antics (and not less sympathetic) as he himself had so often been over the aquarium in his father's museum. That shapeless white blur, that still delayed to sink below the reedy horizon in the Sedge-moor vapours, was to these watchers like the candle which Sam would hold sometimes above some favourite finned pet! In a universe so thrilling and so aching with teeming consciousness, the man and the bowed pollard tree strained and yearned together towards that misty image in the wesi. Cc
He boldly broke up his trance now. tearing at it as if he were some prehistoric dinosaur, rending its way through a nutt*»d entanglement of monstrous moonlit vegetation. Clenching his stick by its centre and closing his fists, he now set himself, in a:i obstinate jog-trot, to re-cross those long meadow-reaches in less than half the time he had taken to cross them. It was thus only about a quarter of an hour later than the hour his Love had given him when he arrived panting at the door of Whitelake Cottage and gave a series of quick low knocks. She didn't let him wait out there for one second. She had been sitting on that couch she had turned into his bed, listening and listening I It was not her destiny to see the moon that night. When Sam, all blinking and panting, threw down his hat and stick on an empty chair and hugged her to his heart he thought to himself—“If life goes on like this, my heart will burst from too much joy.” But he need not have been afraid! The great suction-process of cosmogonic matter—always waiting to drain up in its huge, blind, clay belly, these rapturous overtones of its foster-children—was soon at work, sucking up the spilt drops of his happiness.
They sat down to their incredible meal. Wise had Nell been to restrict their portion that night to the simplest elements! Tea, eggs, butter, bread, honey, and black-currant jam. The taste of each of these things—and Sam swallowed them all in rapid, boyish gulps of heavenly greediness—carried nothing but the very poetry of mortal sustenance into their amorous blood. She kept pulling the loose front of her blue dressing-gown tightly round her classical breasts; so that Sam remained, all through this delicious meal, in complete ignorance of the fact that she had stripped herself naked for him save for her flimsy night-gown.
As to the difference between the sensations of Sam and Nell, as they ate their meal in the midst of this blaze of candlelight and with their bed prepared, the situation was reversed from what it was under former conditions. It was Nell who had become the self-conscious, detached one. savouring every morsel that both she and her lover put into tneir mouths and lingering out their tea-drinking when their hunger was satisfied. Sam on the other hand, with bearing: heart, could not keep out of his mind the thought that when their meal v,\is over he would be allowed to embrace her. He had noticed on his entrance the changed aspect of the couch and though with a lover's tact he had avoided any reference to this transformation, it was evident to him that the girl was tacitly assuming he was going to stay the night; and this was a fact in itself enough to stir his senses. Thus, though he ate his food hungrily and with an eager, nervous greed, he found himself far loo excited to enjoy with the whole-hearted contentment which the girl experienced the progress of their perfect meal. The Theban prophet may have been right when he said that in the act of love the woman feels a greater thrill than the man; but he would have been wrong if he had said this about the expectation of such a consummation. A girl's physical love, except at the moment of actual contact, is much more diffused than a man's. While they were enjoying their tea, therefore, Nell kept saying to herself—“This is my Sam! My Sam has come at last! My Sam belongs to me and I to him! There is no girl in the whole world happier than I. He has come to me at last with a free heart! He loves only me and I love only him! How beautifully those candles shine! What a good thing Sam likes blackcurrant jam. Always, henceforth, when I see black-currant jam, I shall think of him. How glad I am I've put on my blue dressing-gown.”
But Sam's felicity was all this while a little marred by the impetuous craving of his tingling senses. “Will she let me embrace her to the uttermost presently? How soon shall I dare to embrace her? Will she sleep with me all the night on this bed she has made up? Or is it only for me; and will she insist on going upstairs in the night and leaving me here alone?” He finally got so impatient that he could not wait to give her time to finish her second cigarette. He rose up and came round the table and snatched it from her hand. He threw it into the fire. He lifted her up to her feet. He blew out the brightly burning candles on the chimney-piece even while he still clutched her wrist!
This was the moment, as she felt herself pulled across the room by her wrist, that she knew her 5rsi reel spasm of fear of her man; that delicious fear which is an element :n e\ery authentic encounter between the sexes. For all William Zo} land's amorous brutality, though Nell had felt embarrassment and even physical distress when he was embracing her. she had never felt this indescribably delicious quiver of fear. The awkwardness, the material shock of ravishment under Zo) land's violence, had been mitigated by a certain passive inertia, as of the original resistance of matter itself to the stir of blind creation. But now as she felt her blue dressing-gown torn from her body and saw the impersonal glint in Sam's bear-like eyes, she knew a fear much deeper than the mere fear of a girl in the hands of a ravisher. She knew the fear of seeing her Sam, her own well-known Sam, transformed into something unknown and sweetly dreadful! This fear, however, only lasted till he had carried her to that carefully made bed. Then with incredible rapidity it entirely vanished! The cause of its vanishing—though, she analysed it not—was that there had been aroused in her, at last and for the first time, the strongest, the most poignant, the most transporting sensation which exists in the world—the sensation of a feminine body abandoned to the man she loves! To the man; not to the man's body. For the curious thing is that while at this supreme moment she for him had become absolutely impersonal—a woman’s flesh in empty space—he remained for her the actual, personal, conscious man she loved. The extremity of her sensation—that sensation which Teiresias (to his own disaster!) had placed above the man's—implied a vivid consciousness that she, Nell, wTas being possessed by him, Sam.
But with him it was altogether different. His authentic love for her, his pity, his tenderness, his feeling for her beauty, had simply opened wide the gates of ecstasy. Through these gates there rushed now a rapture of bodiless, mindless, delirious sensation. This sensation, dominating now the whole field of his conscious and unconscious being, was much blinder, simpler, less complicated than anything which she felt. Both their sensations centred in her body, not in his. His body was merely the engine of the well-known personality that was now enjoying her. His body might have been ugly, coarse, deformed, grotesque. It might have been made of wood, of iron, of stone, of cement, of peat, of clay. It was her man's dear body; and that was enough! If it had been the body of a leper, it would have been the same. But with him, once again, it was otherwise. His consciousness, even at the beginning of his delight, could only have expressed its rapture by the concept—“She is too sweet.” Then there came a further point in his ecstasy when he could not have even articulated as much as that; when he could perhaps have said no more to describe what he felt than some perfectly incoherent gibberish, some subhuman gibberish that would be identical with what a bird, a beast, a reptile, would utter, or try to utter, as it plunged into that sweet oblivion.
In spite of the unnumbered occasions of erotic satisfaction— paroxysms of normal and of abnormal claspings—which are forever reaching their consummation on all sides of us in the great swirling life-tide, it is surprising how few encounters between amorists, whether human or subhuman, attain to the sublime and absolute ecstasy which was reached tonight by these two. Much more is needed for this than mere physical attraction, or mere mental reciprocity—or even both of these things together! It would almost seem as if every one of us hides in the secret recesses of his being a potentiality for this supreme rapture— but a potentiality that can only be roused by one particular person. It may be an illusion, this feeling that lovers so often have, that they have found the one solitary “alter-ego” in the universe whose identity supplements their own, but it is certainly not an illusion, but a tragic fact, that many human beings—and not by any means sex-starved persons either—go down to their graves without ever having known this indescribable transport. Sam and Nell certainly knew it to the full this night of the New Moon! They took such spacious draughts of it; they plunged into it so desperately, so utterly, that in the mingling of their identities there seemed no portion of either of them—body, soul or spirit— left over, that was not merged and lost in the other.
What Lord P.'s bastard would have seen if he had flung open that door upon them—a man and a girl struggling to return to a primal platonic unity that some terrestrial curse had interrupted—would have been a poor, false, meagre, crude parody of what their submerged consciousnesses were feeling. It was not in any bodily form that reality presented itself to those two at that moment. Their ecstasy itself was the reality, the truth, the essence of what occurred between them! Yes; the “entelecheia/* so to speak, of their desperate claspings upon that couch, was not in the idea of their bodies; was not in the form of their bodies. Such aspects of this event in time and space would have been false if taken as the real reality of that moment. The ”reality"' of that moment—of that infinite series of moments—was what they felt; and what they felt was beyond all human symbolism. What they felt was more rapturous than a rain of blinding, dazzling meteors falling through eternity. It was an iridescent cloudburst, rushing down from unknown translunar regions, and meeting a toppling tower of deep-sea waters, flung up from the abyss!
Nell was a natural, simple girl; and as far as her intellect went, a commonplace girl. Sam was a natural, simple man; and as far as his intellect went, a commonplace man. But compared with the projection of delirious ecstasy which their encounter that night lodged in the atmosphere around Whitelake Cottage the neurotic intensity of the attraction between John and Mary Crow— baffled, tantalised, provoked, throbbing with unrealised and perhaps unrealisable cravings for a consummation that mocked them with its nearness only to withdraw from them again—was something as sad as it was sterile.
It was the girl who, when night fell, slipped from his arms and blew out the spluttering wicks of the two dying candles and balanced the fire-guard against the bars of the grate. He hardly awakened when she returned, so drowsy was he. It was not only the happiness of love that made sleep cover him with such swan's-down feathers; it was the excitement of the last two weeks, weeks that had been full of a mental agitation entirely new to his earth-bound nature. Into this heavenly forgetfulness Nell too was soon sucked down as she nestled close against him; and had Lord P.'s bastard rapped loudly at the door which divided these lovers from that hushed spring night, it would have been long seconds of time before their two souls, so deeply involved, yes! involved down into the very profoundest subcon-sciousness of each of them, had risen up to deal with this fatal intrusion! But no knock at that locked door, no tap at that darkened window, disturbed the peace of those two sleepers. Like poor Tittie Petherton, sleeping now with an expression of felicity such as she had not worn since her disease first attacked her, they slept the sleep of such as are "free among the dead.5' The sleep of consummated love lias indeed nothing in the world comparable to it except the sleep of mother and child.
As these two slept, the shapeless moon sank down over the rim of the Polden Hills. As these two slept, little gusts of midnight air, less noticeable than any wind but breaking the absolute stillness, stirred the pale, green leaf-buds above many a half-finished hedge-sparrow's nest between Queen's Sedgemoor and the Lake Village flats. Here and there, unknown to Sam Dekker or any other naturalist, a few among such nests held one or two cold untimely eggs, over whose brittle blue-tinted rondure moved in stealthy motion these light-borne air-stirrings pursuing their mysterious journeys from one dark horizon to another. Drooping over the rich, black earth in Mr. "Weatherwax's two walled gardens hung motionless the heads of the honey-sweet jonquils and the faint-breath'd narcissi, too heavily asleep in that primordial sleep of green-caiyxed vegetation, deeper and older than the sleep of birds or beasts or men, to respond, even by the shiver of the least petal among them, to these light motions of the midnight air. The sensitised earth-nerves of that portion of the maternal planet upon which these beings lived responded, as she swung forward on her orbit, to the sleep of her numerous offspring by a drowsy deliciousness of her own in the arms of the night, en* closing them all in those interstellar spaces and comforting them all with a peace greater than their peace.