She put her hand gingerly through the bars of the coop to touch one of the chicks. But the hen pecked at her savagely, and Constance drew back, startled and frightened.
‘How she pecks!’ she said in a wondering voice. ‘She won’t let me.’
He crouched down at her side, knees apart, and put his hand softly, slowly into the coop. The old hen pecked at him, but not so viciously as at Constance. She knew him. Slowly, softly he drew forth his closed hand with one of the faintly-piping chicks. He put it into Connie’s hands.
‘Isn’t it adorable!’ she cried, her voice trembling as the chicken stood chirping and quivering its light little life between her hands. ‘Oh, isn’t it adorable! So little and so cheeky!’
In spite of herself, tears came into her eyes, and she bit her lip.
‘It’s one o’ th’ lively ones!’ he said, his voice so close to her. But she bent her head, to hide the dropping of the tears. At first he was unaware. Then he knew, and he said queerly:
‘There’s nothing amiss, is there?’
She shook the tears from her eyes and looked up at him with a wet face, trying to laugh through her tears.
‘It’s —, she said, with a broken laugh — ‘It’s that they’re so unafraid—’ and following the laugh came a sob.
He laid his hand softly on her back as she crouched there and slowly, softly his hand slid down her back, to her loins, in a blind caress.
‘Yo’ shouldna cry!’ he said, softly.
But then came another sob. She held the chick to him, between her two hands.
‘Put it back!’ she wept.
He quickly put his hands to hers, and taking the little, piping bird, ushered it gently back under the mother hen.
But at once his hand had returned, unconscious, to touch her, to the delicate caress of her flank. She had found her scrap of a handkerchief, and was trying to dry her face. His hand slid slowly round her body, touching her breasts that hung inside her dress.
‘Shall yer come?’ he asked, in a quiet, colourless voice.
But his fingers did not cease delicately touching her breasts. Her tears had suddenly left her. His hand touching her breast was like flames. She grasped it in her own hand, and rose to her feet. He was afraid she was rebuking him; but no, she tremblingly clung to his warm, relaxed, uncertain hand.
He had risen, with his arm round her, for she clung to his hand at her breasts. He drew her to him, and she hid her face against him, which was what she wanted to do. He held her quite still for a few moments, and with her face buried against his shoulder, she seemed to go to sleep.
‘Come to th’ hut,’ he said, in a low voice.
She turned submissively. He stooped and shut the coop, and followed her. In the hut, she sat down weakly on the stool. He followed her, and closed the door, so that it was almost dark. Then he turned to her, feeling for her body, feeling with blind overwhelming instinct for the slope of her loins. And she submitted, in a kind of sleep. The groping, soft, helplessly desirous caress of his hand on her body made her pass into a second consciousness, like sleep.
He held her with one hand, and with the other threw down an old blanket from the shelf.
‘You can lie your head on the blanket,’ he said.
And with queer obedience, she lay with her head on the old blanket. She felt him slowly, softly, gently but with queer blind clumsiness fumbling at her clothes, then the quiver of rapture, like a flame, as he touched the soft, naked in-slope of her thighs. But she was not aware of the infinite peace of the entry of his body into hers. That was for the man: the infinite peace of the entry into the woman of his desire.
She lay still, in a kind of sleep. The activity, and the orgasm, was his. And afterwards, stillness, the great stillness when he lay with his arms fast round her, his nakedness touching her, and did not leave her. She remembered what a woman had said to her: ‘You’ll know if a man loves you, if he doesn’t want to get up, away from you, when he’s had you.’
No, he lay with his arms round her, holding her fast, in the mysterious stillness that she dared not break. Till the desire came on him again, and that exquisite and immortal moment of a man’s entry into the woman of his desire.
It was quite dark when he roused, and tried to help her modestly to adjust her clothing. And when he opened the door of the hut, they saw through the oak-trees the thin moon shining with extraordinary brilliance.
‘Ah well!’ he said to himself. ‘It had to come!’
He seemed almost rueful, in a peaceful way. She gave a little laugh.
‘I suppose it had!’ she said.
And he turned sharply, looking at her in surprise. Then he touched her face with his fingers, softly, as a man touches the woman of his desire. That made her proud.
‘I shall have to hurry home,’ she said, softly, looking up at him and wanting him to kiss her. ‘You won’t come with me. — I shall come again soon. — You aren’t sorry, are you?’
But he only looked down at her, and softly stroked her cheek again, and her throat.
‘Say something to me,’ she said plaintively.
‘What should I say to thee?’ he said, displeased, putting his arms round her and holding her close, kissing her. That was really what she wanted. Yet she said again:
‘You aren’t sorry, are you?’
‘Me! No!Are you?’
There was a queer fluctuation in him. She was the woman of his desire. Then he remembered she was a stranger, not belonging to him.
‘I’m glad,’ she said.
But even her very saying of it seemed to put her apart from him.
She walked home quietly, and glad. But he only was conscious that she was gone, and gone where he could not follow; and the complication already had started in his own heart. He was not sure of her. What did she really want? What was it that his own heart wanted of her, and was not sure of?
He tried to shake off the spell of her, and the yearning, and the subtle sense of anxiety. When she was gone, and it was night, he went his round of the wood. All was still. The moon had set. He waited in the darkness under a tree on the knoll whence he could see the lights of Stacks Gate, and some lights of Tevershall. It was a still, lovely spring night, full of life. Yet also, full of dread: that queer, ever-shifting dread of the Midlands.
The lights at Stacks Gate and at Tevershall seemed wickedly sparkling, and the blush of the furnaces, faint and rosy since the night was cloudless, seemed somehow aware. A curious dread possessed him, a sense of defencelessness. Out there, beyond, there were all those white lights and the indefinable quick malevolence that lay in them.
He turned home, to the darkness of the wood. But he knew that the wood was frail, in its darkness and loneliness, as a hollow nut. Like a hollow nut the spiteful spirits of those white lights could crack the solitude of his remnant of old forest, and let in the malevolence. He was not safe. And by taking the woman, and going forth naked to her, he had exposed himself to he knew not what fear, and doom.
It was not fear of the woman, nor fear of love. It was a dread amounting almost to horror, but of something indefinite. It was not that he regretted what he had done. He had wanted the woman intensely, and still wanted her. Slowly, carefully, with a hermit’s scrupulousness, he got his supper of bread, cheese, onions and beer, and prepared the porridge in the double-cooker, for morning. He kept his kitchen very bare, rather homeless-seeming, but clean, tidy, and curiously silent. It was a room in which one felt an accumulated silence, a silence which almost had a will.
Having finished his few chores, he went out again for half an hour with his dog. The fear that was on him was not a fear of poachers: not a fear of anything definite. Neither was it a sense of having done wrong. In this respect, he had no conscience. He often felt he had been a fool, but he never felt he had been wrong. The word ‘sin’ had no meaning for him. He went round the wood without any fear of the darkness, yet with a sense of dread almost putting down his shoulders, and contracting his heart. It wa
s the dread an independent, solitary individual has of society, of the human mass.
Constance, for her part, felt more buoyant than she had felt for years, as if all the troubles of the world had rolled away. She would be in time for dinner, at half past seven, so no one could question her.
She found the doors of the house all closed, however, and had to ring. This annoyed her. Mrs Bo1ton opened.
‘Oh, your ladyship, I was beginning to wonder what had become of you!’ the woman said sotto voce and roguishly. ‘Sir Clifford has never asked for you: he’s got Mr Linley in with him, talking over something important. Shall I put dinner back a bit?’
‘Perhaps you might — ten minutes.’
‘Very good, your ladyship. That’ll give you time to dress —if Mr Linley is staying to dinner.’
Mr Linley was the general manager of the collieries: a thin, red-faced, quiet man from the north, with not quite enough punch for Clifford: not up to post-war conditions. Connie liked him, however, but could not stand his wife, a blonde, over-dressed woman out of a country vicarage, very obsequious and toadying. However, she was not there.
Linley stayed to dinner, and Connie was the hostess men liked so much, so modest, yet so aware, with big wide blue eyes and a soft repose that sufficiently hid her cleverness. She had played this woman so much, it was almost second nature to her. And it was curious, how everything disappeared out of her consciousness while she played it.
Yet with joy she was cherishing her memories in reserve. She had achieved a great triumph: the man loved her with his body. That she knew. She knew he had felt an overwhelming desire for her, and a profound, passionate pleasure in going into her. It surprised her a little. She had felt nothing so extreme. But it pleased her that he had felt it. ‘With my body I thee worship,’ says the man to the woman in the marriage service. And she felt it had been so with him: an act of bodily worship. That surprised her and moved her, and made her glad.
But she was still vague, confused. She wanted the experience again. It had not, as it were, gone right home to her.
She went to the wood in the afternoon, the next day. It was a grey, still afternoon, with the dog’s-mercury coming dark-green near the hazel roots, and the trees making the silent effort to open their buds. In the unconscious one felt it, the heave of the great weight of powerful sap in all the trees, upwards, outwards, to the bud-tips. It was like a tide running out to flood, very full, filling every outreaching twig to surcharge. And over-head, all through the wood, the tree-buds faintly stirred, like bees slowly waking.
Constance, however, was not conscious of anything save her own waiting. She came to the clearing of the hut. He was not there. But the pheasant chicks were running lightly abroad, light as insects, from the coops where the yellow hens clucked anxiously. Constance crouched and watched them, and waited. She only waited. Even the chicks she hardly saw. She only waited.
And he did not come. The time passed with a dream-like slowness yet when it was gone, how quickly it had gone! He did not come. And it was half past four. She must go home to tea. She hesitated. Something tenacious and obstinate in her made her want to stay on at the hut, if she had to wait till midnight.
But she reproved herself. It would be far better to go home to tea, and to come again after tea. Perhaps he only expected her after tea. That would be better. Then Clifford would have nothing to be surprised about. And he would be there waiting for her when she came. Yes, that was what she would do.
She hurried home. And as she went, a fine drizzle began to fall.
‘Is it raining again?’ said Clifford, as she shook her hat
‘Just drizzle.’
‘We might have a game of bezique after tea.’
She looked at him in her slow, inscrutable way.
‘I think I’d better rest till dinner,’ she said. ‘The spring makes one feel queer.’
‘Unsettled, doesn’t it! There’s nothing wrong, is there?’
‘No, no! Perhaps Mrs Bolton will have a game of cards with you.’
‘She will if I ask her. But probably I shall just listen in.’
When Constance heard the loud speaker idiotically, in a velveteen sort of voice, announcing a series of street cries, she slipped out of the side door. The drizzle of rain was like a veil over the world, mysterious, and not cold. She got very warm in her old blue mackintosh, as she hurried across the park.
How still the wood was! how secret and full of the mystery of buds and eggs and unsheathing! how wonderful all of it in the silent rain-mist, the trees glistening naked and dark, as if they had unclothed themselves, and the green things on the earth seeming to glow in greenness.
She arrived in the clearing expecting to see him. He was not there. The hut was locked. The chicks were gone under their mother-hens, but the coops were not shut up. He had not been. Perhaps something was wrong! She hesitated, whether to go to the cottage for him.
But no. She was born to wait, and in waiting lay her strength. She opened the hut with her key. It was all tidy, the corn put in the bin, the straw neat in one corner, the blankets folded on the shelf, the lantern hung on a nail. It looked, for some reason, forlorn, now it was so tidy. No litter on the work-bench, no liner on the floor. It had the look of a man’s shut-up workshop.
She sat down on her stool, and watched through the open door, sitting in the doorway. How still everything was! how secret and retired into itself! The fine rain blew softly, filmily, but the wind made no noise. Nothing made a noise. Everything was silent and twilit, and alive. And the time passed. He did not come.
It was half past six, night falling, when suddenly he came into the clearing, ducking rather in his walk, and looking ghostly. He gave a quick look towards the hut, and saw her sitting there, another ghost. He gave a little, half-finished salute, and swerved aside to the coops, bending over them in silence, shutting them up and seeing they were well protected.
And Constance waited. She sat in the doorway of the hut, watching the shadowy, unwilling man, and waiting. Till at last he came slowly, unwillingly towards her, glancing at her with a swift, unwilling glance. His face was ruddy, but a bit abstracted, as if he were holding himself absent.
‘You are late!’ she said softly.
‘Aye!’ he replied. And nothing further.
She looked up into his face, but did not meet his eye.
‘Didn’t you want me to wait for you today?’ she asked sadly.
He glanced swiftly at her.
‘Won’t the folks at the hall be thinking something, you coming here every night?’ he said, in his harsh voice.
‘It isn’t every night. They don’t know where I am. They won’t think anything,’ she said.
He looked away, not saying anything.
She rose from her stool in the doorway.
‘Did you want to come into the hut?’ she said.
‘Only to lock up.’
She paused. Then she flushed steadily as she said:
‘Are you sorry — about yesterday?’
He looked at her, and saw the deep blush burning her cheek and her throat.
‘Me?’ he said. ‘It’s you! Aren’t you?’
Her lips quivered a little as she said:
‘I was so glad.’
He dropped his head, and said in a low voice, rather hard:
‘Don’t you feel as you’ve lowered yourself, with the likes of me?’
There was something satirical in the question.
‘Do I feel I’ve lowered myself? Why? Do you feel I’ve lowered myself?’ she asked, puzzled and hurt.
He had his faint, yet somehow vivid little ironical smile on his face.
‘Wi’ one o’ your husband’s servants, like,’ he said.
‘You’re not a servant, you’re a gamekeeper,’ she replied, hurt. ‘But perhaps you feel you — you’ve lost something —’
‘It’s not that, your lady—’ He broke off, and added in the vernacular, with a twisted grimace: ‘I canna ca’ yer your ladys
hip an’ then —’ He flung back his shoulders and pressed back his bead in his own queer gesture.
‘I don’t want you to call me your ladyship,’ she said. ‘I don’t care about it ever. I don’t really like it, ever. And if you like me—’
She paused, and he watched her narrowly.
‘Do yo’ like me?’ he said.
She gazed up at him with her wide blue eyes.
‘Yes!’ she said pathetically.
He continued to gaze down at her.
‘Ay!’ he said. ‘’Appen tha does, tha ’appen does! But ’ow do we stan’, thee an’ me?’ He spoke rapidly, taking a kind of ironical refuge in the dialect.
‘How?’ she said naïvely, not following.
He did not answer her, but gazed on her with bright, concentrated eyes.
‘Tha’lt be sorry, tha’lt be sorry!’ he reiterated.
‘Oh no!’ she replied, starting ‘Why? Why should I? I don’t think you need be afraid.’
He gazed down on her, with a queer baffled smile in his eyes.
‘Well,’ he said slowly. ‘If tha doesna care — if tha wants it —! On’y when tha’rt sorry for’t, dunna tell me.’
‘If you knew how much it meant to me,’ she said truthfully.
‘What way?’ he said, still ironical.
But she only gazed up at him, unable to say more.
And then she saw a strange thing. Suddenly his eyes changed, seemed to grow large and dark and full of flashing, leaping light, that leaped up and down in the dark, dilated pupil. He came towards her and took her against him.
‘Ay,’ he said, in an abstracted voice, ‘let’s gi’e in, then! What’s good sayin’ ’owt! Tha knows what ter’t doin’.’
Suddenly his resistance left him, and he folded round her, Wrapped her with his body. He had ceased to resist or to remember, letting his body live of itself. She wanted him to kiss her and speak to her, but his hands wandered with the blind instinct down to her loins.
‘Let’s go inside,’ he murmured.
John Thomas and Lady Jane Page 14
