He shut the door of the hut, and dried her upon an old sheet which he had put with the blankets on the shelf, and she rubbed him down, the glistening, healthy white back. Then, still panting, they slung a blanket over their shoulders, and sat before the fire, warming the front of their naked bodies, and panting speechless. The brown dog shook herself like another sudden shower, and he shouted at her, in a queer wild voice, to get back.
Turning round to the dog, he had noticed the torn handful of wet flowers on the bench. He took them up and looked at them.
‘They stop out-doors all weathers,’ he said.
She sat with her knees open, receiving the fire-glow on the soft folds of her body. He looked at her with interested scrutiny and at the fleece of brown hair that hung in its soft point between her thighs. Suddenly, he leaned over and threaded a few forget-me-not flowers in the golden-brown fleece of the mount of Venus.
‘There’s a forget-me-not in the right place,’ he said.
‘Doesn’t it look pretty!’ she said, looking down at the milky, odd little stars at the lower tip of her body, among the hair.
‘The prettiest part of you!’ he said, smiling.
And he laid his hand, brown and warm, upon the ivory, silky inner thigh of the woman, stroking it softly.
‘You must have a flower as well,’ she said.
And reaching over, she threaded two pink campions in the bush of red-brown hair above his penis.
‘Charming!’ she cried. ‘Charming!’ Then in the darker hair of his breast she stuck a spray of forget-me-nots.
‘Now you’ve got a forget-me-not in the right place, as well!’ she said.
He laughed, and the flowers shook on his body.
‘Wait a bit!’ he said.
He got up, and quietly opened the door. The sudden rain had abated, the mysterious twilight was gone. He stepped out quickly in the soft rain, and she saw his white figure among the leaves, stooping and gathering flowers.
He came back with a mixed bunch of forget-me-nots, campions, bugle, bryony, primroses, golden-brown oak-sprays. She watched him running towards the hut with this bunch of herbage, his knees lifting wild and quick, his red face glistening with an inward, intent look, and again she felt a certain fear, as of the wild men of the woods whom she remembered in old German drawings.
He shook the flowers and laughed at her, showing a slight flash of his teeth, as she shut the door.
‘You want to be dressed up,’ he said.
Coming to the fire, he sat down and turned towards her. He put sprays of fluffy young oak under her breasts, and the weight of the breasts held them there. Then among the oak-leaves he put a few bluebells. He twisted a spray of bryony round her arm, Poised a primrose in her navel, and put primroses- and forget-me-not in the hair of the mount of love. There she was, with odd sprays of flowers and leaves on her naked body.
‘Now you’ll do!’ he said.
And he stuck flowers in the hair of his own body, with a childish interest. She looked at him in wonder and amusement, the odd intentness with which he did things. And she pushed a campion flower into his moustache, where it dangled under his nose.
‘Now you’ve got a nose ornament as well!’ she said.
He put more sticks on the fire, so that it blazed up. Outside, the morning was coming clear.
‘We might as well make hay while it rains,’ he said, ‘if other folks makes it while the sun shines.’
‘Wouldn’t it be nice,’ she said, ‘if there weren’t many people in the world, and this wood was a forest as it used to be.’
‘Ay!’ he said softly. ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if we could squash it all up, Tevershall an’ Sheffield an’ all the rest?’
‘And Wragby!’
‘Ay, Wragby!’ he said with contempt.
He was silent for some minutes, looking at the fire.
‘You feel sometimes,’ he said, looking at her, ‘as if you could start out with a hatchet an’ begin smashin’ the whole place up. Sometimes, when I’m at top o’ the hill in th’ wood here, something comes up inside me, an’ I feel my heart ’d fly out o’ my body, wi’ rage, an’ because I fair hate it all, all there is outside this wood.’
She was silent, with a sense of foreboding.
‘The world is so big!’ she said. ‘And it spreads over everything. The best is to dodge it, and forget.’
‘Ay!’ he said. ‘Dodge it. But when you’re dodgin’ a man who’s after you, you don’t half hate him. An’ now, you have to dodge everybody, an’ hate everybody —’
He went into a silence, the old silence of fear.
Suddenly he held out his arms to her, and his knees.
‘Come here a bit!’ he said. ‘Come an’ sit with me!’
He was seated on a low log before the corner fire. She came and squatted between his thighs, leaning back on his naked body. And he pressed her between his thighs, with uncanny quivering power.
‘If they knowed we was like this,’ he said, ‘they’d want to kill us. If they knowed you had forget-me-nots in your maiden-hair, they’d want to kill us.’ He pressed his powerful thighs on her, and held her close. ‘Should you like to go away wi’ me to Canada or somewhere?’ he asked.
She curled over and laid her face on his thigh, feeling his penis more curiously, with the little life of its own, against her back. ‘The world is all alike, all over,’ she said. ‘It would be the same in Canada.’
He was silent, unwilling to accept this.
‘It might be,’ he said slowly. ‘An’ it mightn’t.’
‘Ah!’ she said. ‘You can’t get away from it. The world is the same all over. Or at least, our world has got all the rest of the world in its grip, right to the North Pole. You can’t get away.’
‘But nobody would know us,’ he said.
‘They soon would. And it would be the same.’
He felt it was true, so he sat silent. Outside, the morning was brightening, the sun was going to shine.
‘Sit in my lap,’ he said. ‘Sit in my lap.’
He closed his thighs, and she curled up in the hollow of his body, his head bent over hers.
‘They won’t leave us alone, you know, not for long,’ he said.
She received this in silence. Then she said in a low, dull voice:
‘No! I know!’
There was silence. He glanced at the brightening day outside. ‘You wouldn’t like me to get a little farm,’ she said, ‘and you live on that, and work it? I’ve got enough money of my own. And you’d be your own master?’
‘And what about you?’ he said.
‘I don’t know. Perhaps I’d come and live with you.’
‘We should both have to get divorces.’
‘Yes, I know. But we could find a little farm somewhere — and you could start it, no matter where I was —’
‘How much money have you got?’ he asked her.
And even she hesitated before she said:
‘I don’t quite know. But I have between four and five hundred a year.’
‘Between four and five hundred of your very own? Every year?’
‘Yes! From my mother.’
‘You’re all right then, for money!’ he said. ‘I thought I was well off, wi’ two hundred pounds to my name, let alone four or five hundred a year.’
She was silent. She felt him, for some reason, withdraw a little from her, now she was rich in his estimation.
‘Would you like a farm?’ she said. ‘My sister would help me to get it. She’s very practical.’
He was silent for some time. Then he answered slowly:
‘I don’t think I want a woman to set me up in business, like, I don’t think I do.’
‘But I’m not a woman, merely: at least, not to you. And it wouldn’t be just setting you up in business. You could start. And then I could come and live with you if — if we both got divorced, and we wanted to live together. And anyhow, I could come and stay with you sometimes.’
He answered only
the first part of her proposition.
‘You’d never want to live wi’ me on a little farm,’ he said. ‘You’d never want to be Mrs Oliver Parkin.’
‘Why not?’ she said. ‘I think I should. We should be independent. And at least we could see how things worked out.’
‘With who?’
‘With you and me — and Clifford — and your wife. We could see if we wanted to get divorced and marry again. Perhaps you wouldn’t any more than I should. Perhaps less. Perhaps it you who really hate marriage, not me.’
He pondered this in silence, without reply.
‘I think,’ she continued, ‘you like to be alone most of your time. I think you only want me sometimes. I think you don’t want me always there. I think you’d find me a burden and a strain on you, if I was there morning, noon, and night.’
Still he pondered in silence.
‘I believe in marriage,’ she said. ‘But I don’t believe in living together. At least I think I don’t believe in it. What ruins marriage is that the man and woman always live together, on top of one another. If they lived apart in separate houses, they’d be able to go on liking one another. And if not, it wouldn’t matter very much. — That’s why I think it would be nice if you could have a little farm, and I could come and see you sometimes, and we needn’t burden one another with marriage. I’ve been saddled with one marriage. So have you. And I don’t believe either of us wants another, not with anybody on earth. If we were two angels, I don’t believe we should want to put the burden of marriage on one another. Do you?’
‘No!’ he said. ‘No! I don’t. The minute you marry a woman, she’s spoilt for you. She becomes a part of the whole my-eye bossing business as makes a man’s balls go deader than sheep’s kidneys.’
‘And the woman hates it just as much,’ she said. ‘So why don’t you let us find a farm where you can live and make a living, and I can come and be your wife sometimes, like it is here, in the wood?’
‘And you’d go on living wi’ Sir Clifford?’ he asked.
‘For the time being, at any rate,’ she said.
He was silent. A shaft of sunlight fell into the hut. He glanced uneasily at the window.
‘The sun’s out!’ he said. ‘Anyhow, we can be thinkin’ about it while you’re gone. No need to fix nothing. But they wouldn’t let you, you know, live wi’ Sir Clifford an’ come an’ be my wife sometimes. They wouldn’t let you.’
‘Who wouldn’t? They wouldn’t know.’
‘Everybody! They’d find out, some road or other.’
‘Everybody’s nobody!’
‘Ay! That’s what they say! Well, Sir Clifford wouldn’t. He might let you go on the randazzle for a bit. But he’d put a stop to it after a while. He’d be your boss.’
‘Oh no! Surely you know you’ve no reason to be jealous of poor Clifford.’
‘Poor Clifford if you like! But if you live with him, he’s your master, say what you may.’
‘Is he my master at this minute?’
‘You’ll have to mind to get home in time for dinner,’ he said.
‘And if I lived with you, would you be my master?’ she said.
‘In away! If we was married. In a way!’
She sighed with impatience.
‘I don’t want a master, of any sort,’ she said.
‘Nay, an’ I don’t want to be one, neither. Neither do I want to be bossed, not by anybody, man nor woman. But folks won’t let you be. Especially if you get married.’
‘We aren’t married, are we?’ she said, clinging to him.
‘No!’ he said. ‘There’s a lot between us an’ marriage.’
‘Let’s not think of it!’ she said. ‘Kiss me, and let’s not think of it.’
She lifted her face, and he kissed her. The flowers had fallen from her breasts and her navel.
‘If there weren’t so many beastly people in the world!’ she said.
‘Ay!’ he replied. ‘But there are.’
‘Never mind!’ she said, clinging to him. ‘Love me while you can!’ She clung to him, and caressed him, and felt his phallus rise against her.
‘I love it!’ she said, quivering, and feeling the rapid thrills go through her loins. ‘I love it when he rises like that, so proud. It’s the only time when I feel there is nothing really to be afraid of, from all over the world of people. They seem so insignificant. I love it when he comes in to me!’
She clung to the man’s shoulder, in the wild thrills of forgetting.
They went out, dressed, into bright June sunshine.
‘I’ll come to you tomorrow night!’ she said. ‘Shall I? Shall I? And Hilda can wait for me in the morning at the end of the lane. Shall I?’
And that evening, the last before Connie’s departure, Clifford read out to her a bit from the end of a book he had been reading. He was still concerned with his own immortality, he still read every new book about God. And this last one seemed to please him.
‘Listen to this, Connie,’ he said. ‘If only we were an aeon or two ahead, you’d have no need to go out looking for a Holy Ghost on two legs. Listen to our latest famous philosopher. — “The universe shows us two aspects: on one side it is physically wasting, on the other side it is spiritually ascending.”’
‘How does he know?’ said Connie. ‘Does he take its weight every day?’
‘I don’t know. He’s a great man, and a vogue. Listen! — “It is thus passing, with a slowness inconceivable in our measures of time, to new creative conditions, amid which the physical world, as we at present know it, will be represented by a ripple barely to be distinguished from non-entity!”’
‘Oh, he only knows he’s going to die!’ said Connie. ‘I suppose he will leave behind a ripple scarcely distinguishable from non-entity. But who cares?’
‘Listen! Don’t interrupt the great man in his last solemn words! “The present type of order in the world has risen from an unimaginable past, and it will find its grave in an unimaginable future. There remains the inexhaustive realm of abstract forms, and creativity, with its shifting character ever determined afresh by its own creatures, and God, upon whose wisdom all forms of order depend.” There! How’s that!’
‘Amen! Saleh! Hallelujah and all the rest to him!’ she said. ‘He’s another windbag, talking about unimaginables. I expect he’s one of these intellectuals with a dead body so he wants to kill everything and have a universe of abstract forms.’
‘I thought it would get you,’ he said, amused.
‘Men who talk about God nowadays,’ she said, ‘must be half-defunct. They go on about unimaginable futures and pasts. If they had ten drops of blood in their bodies, they’d hold their tongues.’
‘Tell me how you expect the unimaginable future will work out,’ he said, looking at her excited face and glowing eyes.
‘I don’t have futures if I can’t imagine them,’ she said. ‘And anyhow, I don’t pretend they’re unimaginable, and then stuff them full of abstract forms.’
‘No! But don’t you imagine any unimaginable future?’
‘Oh, I do! And it’s so physical! Such amazing physical awarenesses! and marvellous delicate contacts, touches, between men and women who still keep apart. I can imagine men and women with quite different sorts of consciousness from ours: silent, and intuitive, and physical like perfume.’
She looked at him with brilliant, excited eyes, such as he had never seen before.
‘And will these delicate physical beings have guts?’
‘Oh yes! If there is a God, he has guts.’
‘And occasional indigestion?’
‘Yes! If there is a God, he has occasional indigestion.’
‘In fact, he is capable of all the marital services.’
‘Why yes! How could there be a god who left it out?’
‘Tu l’as voulu, Georges Dandin!’ he said, with a grin. ‘A God who occasionally smells?’
“Why not? else a civet cat would have the better of him.’
&nbs
p; ‘And a skunk might lift its tail and turn its rear at him, and be his boss! — Why not? Quite! They are part of creation, and creation’s order. Quite! God must have an oesophagus and alimentary canal, I suppose, so long as we’ve got one. But if we evolve beyond it, presumably God will have done the same. Or is God still an ichthyosaurus? I suppose he must contain the principle: of the ichthyosaurus and the dodo. Everything that has passed away can’t have passed because it was evil, can it? Since creativity is change. — You are right, God must be everything that is part of the creative order: and so he must have guts and testicles. You are quite right. But he must also be pure spirit, and I prefer that aspect.’
She looked at him in wonder.
‘I never heard you be so clever, Clifford,’ she said.
‘Really! But I’m joking. Wherein do you see cleverness?’
‘That God must have bowels and testicles!’
‘And that he must urinate, and have occasional flatulence?’
‘Yes! Of course; Now at last I love him!’
‘My dear, you would! Cherchez l’homme! — But I am jesting.’
‘No you’re not! You’re serious! And for once, for once, you’ve really spoken the truth.’
‘But my dear, you knew I believe that God is eliminating the guts and testes part, and passing into pure spirit.’
‘Never! You don’t believe it! God is just waking up the gut and testes to real creativity.’
‘My dear, you are a real Don Quixote! Avoid everything but trying to come face to face with your Dulcineo del Toboso; your Don Dulcineo! Since you are the Doña Quixote de la Wragby!’
‘You are so witty tonight, Clifford!’ she said.
‘And you, my dear, are flashing, with lightning like a hot summer night. You look like a Bacchante just off to the hill with the Iacchos! cry ready in your throat.’
‘How clever of me to look all that!’ she said.
‘But you are so glad to be going!’
John Thomas and Lady Jane Page 30