Wild Geese Overhead (29 page)

But he hadn't—not with the whole summer ahead! At thought of the whole summer, the weeks and the months, the early birches, the warmth in the earth, the uplands, the June nights, the long enchanted June nights, his mind swooned away under the sun, carrying the June twilight of its thought with it, wherein Jenny walked bareheaded.

He was still a bit weak probably! Silently he laughed and looked with slanting eyes at the shadows on the blind.

What a change had come upon his spirit since he had come to this farm! Yet all that had happened had really been the simplest thing in the world. By a lucky chance, he had broken through the integument of fear and hatred and grey concern that wrap the daily life around, and risen above it. There was nothing mysterious at all in the performance, though the effect was magical. Any simple person lying on his back in the sun, with closed eyes, listening to the wind in a tree or the sea on a shore, would experience the effect to a certain degree. And any one who has so experienced it for a moment opens his eyes with a smile, a smile of goodness and beneficence, and an inclination to hum with wind or sea.

After that, thought Will, it is entirely a matter of degree. Personal trouble or social tragedy may supervene…but always cunningly at the back of the mind will be the
memory
of the release, like an effect of light.

And what works for the individual must also work—let it come!—for humanity.

Noble thought! It charged Will with happy laughter. Most of the solemnity and ideals that infect the world should be stuffed into a bag and drowned in mid-Atlantic!

Oh Lord, was Jenny never going to get up? Was she lying awake thinking—what? He could see her grave face turned towards the window, the eyes brimming with light. There was a picture for a poor fellow! He groaned—and came alive like a squirrel as her door opened and closed.

He leapt out of bed, and then sat heavily down again. The body was not quite so strong as all that yet! Its weakness was a joke. Perhaps it never had even had concussion. Defence mechanism only! You watch it! said Will. It's as full of tricks as a bag of monkeys.

They breakfasted apart, but set off immediately afterwards on the walk which Jenny had promised to take him. But first the tour of the garden. She so loved the garden that in a moment she was all alive. And Will saw that this was something which no one could ever take from her. It was her elm-tree and her sun! And he was glad, profoundly glad, that she had something she loved, apart from himself or any one else.

“Behold the hole I made in the bishopweed!” he said ruefully.

She looked at the wreck of his labour and turned away at once.

He glanced after her and followed. “I suppose it was very wrong of me, but I didn't——”

“I was horrid,” she interrupted him shortly.

As they were going up the farm road above the steading, he said: “I'll tell you an odd experience I had. I was once walking along a street and I saw a girl walking in front of me with quite the most perfect figure you ever saw. So I thought to myself what a pity it is that in life you rarely see a body like that with a face to match. So I hurried up a bit and had a side glance at the face and lo! it did match. That so took my breath away that I swerved and found myself in front of a bookseller's shop; and staring at me was a book, entitled
How to Make a Rock Garden
. So as I didn't want to overtake the girl, I went in and bought the book. An odd experience, wasn't it?”

“Very.”

“Though to give life its due, it's full of these odd experiences. But I never had the courage to give the girl the book.”

“Why?”

“Well,” said Will, “you gave me every chance to present it to you, didn't you?”

She stopped and looked at him with that troubling of surprise and wonder that he would never get used to. She read the truth of the story in his eyes and went on at once.

They were silent for a little time.

“It's a very good book,” he said, in cheerful practical tones. “I have it down there. And that bank is a grand place for it. I'll have to do a little work to toughen me up, and a little harmless weeding—if you're sure I wouldn't be intruding?”

She stopped abruptly. “Would you?” she asked, her face kindling. “I have longed for rock plants. Plants that come up every year. I cannot tell you about them.” She thought for a moment and then went on: “If we plan that out—I might come out one or two evenings during the week—to see how it's going on. The bus fares would ruin me, but—I'd come.”

“Would you?”

“Yes. And we'll have to get stones. And not ordinary stones but bits of rocks, and not just sticking them in the ground like little dogs' graves, but making ledges of them and building them up.”

She walked away with this exciting thought until they came to the place where she had overtaken him as she came down from the wood.

“That's the wood,” she said. “Perhaps you'll find it a sad wood.”

“How have you found it?”

“We'll go this way, by the small burn.… Look!”

In every nook and cranny, overhanging the water, everywhere, the two sides of the little burn were starred with primroses. “These are celandines,” she said, “Wordsworth's flower. And that, colts-foot.” She was walking on. “This greeny-gold stuff is wood spurge. Of course, the year hasn't started yet. But this spot is a marvel, right up to the wood. To lie here and listen to the humble-bees on a summer day, when it's in full flower, is very pleasant. You don't quite go to sleep, but hover about, like a bee yourself. Do you like it?”

“Yes,” he said quietly. Its intimate invisible face ran round the corner.

She walked on calmly, and he had the odd notion that the flowers did not look at her but at him, the intruder, before they turned, and went on with her. Her ankles were firm and her feet moved with a sure grace over the springy turf. With a momentary touch of panic, he saw her in sober truth as Primavera, and he stared at the curves of her body and her golden head. Then he looked down at the grass, at the primroses, with an expression arrested a little in awe.

When they had opened and shut the field gate, she told him to follow her, because for a short distance it was marshy in between the scattered trees. She went quickly from tussock to tussock and he followed. “Now it's all right,” she said.

The ground sloped up what looked like the side of a mound, and they had to stoop under branches and dodge round bushes; but within a few yards they emerged on flat ground, on top of what seemed a great circular mound, covered deeply in yellow-green of moss and close-cropped grass. Their footfalls were so noiseless that rabbits sat up before taking to their long hind legs. “Look!” she whispered, and pointed with her eyes to a rabbit couched under the root of a juniper bush a couple of paces to his right. It obviously had been surprised too late and decided to risk lying still. Round eyes, flattened ears, and sensitive nostrils. He followed Jenny at once. But there was a quick beat in his heart now, and looking up he saw the sunlight arrested in this still place. And the trees—had he ever seen that exquisite brown of larches before the delicate green needles come? But what was this? Each larch seemed lit with little upright red globes. He rubbed his eyes, but they did not vanish. He went forward and gazed at the fairy-like lights, at the tender deep red cone flowers. Slowly he looked about him, in the hushed warmth, and softly began to laugh, his eyes alert and his ears. Then he remembered Jenny and looked at her.

She was smiling, her face full of a deeper warmth than sunlight, and an expression in her eyes friendly and tender. “I hoped you would laugh,” she said.

He glanced away from her, until the sudden tumult would subside. “So this was your test?”

“No. It wouldn't have mattered anyway. But I'm glad. I love this place.”

“You come here often?”

“Yes. Every Sunday. The sun always seems to shine on this ancient mound. No one has ever been here with me before.”

He could not look at her. Could not trust himself, did not know what to say, so he said: “You did not seem happy, coming down from the wood, that day.”

“No—because you had destroyed my happiness. You were digging in the garden. You came into the wood in my mind. I think I hated you. I was fond of Philip.”

“But what had I done?”

“Nothing. That face of yours just haunted me—like a crime.” She tried to smile. “You cannot understand how that made me ashamed of myself, how it drove me—oh, I don't know.”

His expression quickened in humour. “Crime! It is an accepted fact that persons with a secret vice know each other when they meet. In a moment they know it, without sign or symbol, as we knew each other.” He was finding it difficult to speak. He gazed over the tops of the trees. “The wild geese are nesting in the far north.” But his effort at a smile ran cold upon his face. He looked at her and found she was trembling, as he was himself. They came to each other swiftly, and clung strongly together, to keep their parts from flying adrift.

The shadow of a pigeon sped swiftly over the grass. A pair of chaffinches flirted through the air. Bird-notes warbled down through the branches that carried their tiny deep red cones and pin-points of green. Up from the valley fields came the crying of a colony of gulls. Far into the moor above, a cock grouse crew.

The mound lay with its back in the sun, full of silence, of the past, of sleepy memories of strange rites being dreamed into the present, into the future. A rabbit appeared from behind a juniper bush and, seeing them, sat up on its hind legs, its forelegs drooping against its body, its ears cocked and pink against the sun, like a rabbit in a fairy story. Everywhere the yellow-green moss was patterned with sunlight and shadow. Through a depth of tree-tops came the croodling of a pigeon:
You're
too too
lazy! You're
too too
lazy! You!

They were sitting now a little apart, he with his legs crossed and she with her heels tucked under her. Because of the strange sweet tension in their hearts, they sat in silence, their minds and bodies open to their environment so that they seemed part of it, diffused through it.

Out of the tranced mood, he smiled and said: “This is an illustration of a theory of mine. At that moment when you are most intensely yourself, you are also most intensely part of everything else—even of some one else.” He gave her a sly look. But she did not respond nor yet withdraw her eyes. An amber cup brimful and still. She had the intuition to wait for his deeper meaning. And he suddenly said sharply: “Oh Lord, Jenny, don't look at me like that or I'm lost!” He turned his head away and the rabbit hopped a few steps and sat up again. “So let us talk. How often we'll have to talk!” His voice quivered with mirth. “Are you looking forward to it?”

She nodded, and her smile, deep and glimmering, came outward upon her face.

“Jenny, you are very very lovely,” he said quietly.

“I'm waiting!” she replied.

“I think you've been waiting since time began. And—you'll be waiting on some such mound till time is dead.” His head moved in restless humour. “Were you conscious of waiting?”

She sat quite still, looking away. “Yes,” she said at last. “And yet I don't know,” she added. “Or—at least—I know only now.”

“That's a lovely one,” he murmured.

But she did not let the remark disturb her. “I loved being here alone. There were moments—sheer lovely moments—I did not want any one. The green coming on the grass, on the trees. And the sun. Then, too, down in the garden. Sometimes, in the office, when things were difficult, I could, away at the back of my mind, walk into the garden and look at a primula. I could—get its scent. It—I don't know, I can't tell you.”

He sat looking down at his hands, silent.

“I'm sorry”, she said, “that I was rude to you, but you came—well——”

“The serpent into the garden, the insinuating city serpent.”

She nodded. “It was even worse than that.
That
I might have managed. But your face, against the trees, that first time I saw you: you looked round—I'm not good at explaining—but there was something about that moment that was uncanny. It was as if I had seen your face before in some other land or in a dream—all of a sudden, before I could think, like a heart-beat. I saw at once it was nonsense. I banished you. I laughed calmly at myself. But there were moments when you persisted in coming back, that I hated you. Nothing like it had ever happened to me before. Young girls may fancy they fall in love and so on, but—nothing ever
like that
. I wasn't curious or interested—I think I was afraid—perhaps, too, because of other things that were happening to me. Let me confess one silly thing. I saw you more often than you are aware! I was trying to see you look ordinary and commonplace. And twice—twice—I thought I did. I was glad. And then, one day in the office, when my mind was all in a tumult—you looked at me from the edge of your wood. It was terrible, as if you'd stung me. And it was, oh, it was humiliating!”

“The day you came down the ward, you didn't sting me: you stabbed me with a knife. Think of the utter humiliation of fainting!” They were both smiling, their fingers plucking about the moss. “You came down the ward like Primavera, calm, with the sun in your yellow hair and birds about your head and daffodils in your hands. Dear God, had you no idea of the enormity of what you were doing? Had you no pity?”

“If you had known the effort it took to do that!”

He looked away. “There are five rabbits now.”

“I have counted eleven,” she said.

“Why are they not frightened of our voices?”

“Because we don't mean them any harm.”

Her simple words made him breathe deeply, as if they had raised a small tumult of emotion.

“Do you think we'll ever get to the end of this story?”