“If you’re quite sure it isn’t troubling you too much,” he said, with that soft courtesy which distinguished him.
“Oh, it’s no trouble,” they both said.
He looked, smiling with delight, from one to another.
“It’s awfully nice not to have to turn out again, isn’t it?” he said gratefully.
“I suppose it is,” said Banford.
March disappeared to attend the room. Banford was as pleased and thoughtful as if she had her own young brother home from France. It gave her just the same kind of gratification to attend on him, to get out the bath for him, and everything. Her natural warmth and kindliness had now an outlet. And the youth luxuriated in her sisterly attention. But it puzzled him slightly to know that March was silently working for him too. She was so curiously silent and obliterated. It seemed to him he had not really seen her. She continued to elude him. He felt he should not know her if he met her in the road.
That night March dreamt vividly.
She dreamt she heard a singing outside, which she could not understand, a singing that roamed round the house, in the fields, and in the darkness. It moved her so that she felt she must weep.
She went out, and suddenly she knew it was the fox singing. He was very yellow and bright, like corn. She went nearer to him, but he ran away and ceased singing. He seemed near, and she wanted to touch him to feel that wild combination of roughness and beauty. She wanted him to know she was there, so she stretched out her hand, but suddenly he bit her wrist, and at the same instant, as she drew back, the fox, turning round to bound away, whisked his brush across her face, and it seemed his brush was on fire, for it seared and burned her mouth with a great pain.
The pain poured down from her mouth, through her breasts and deep into her centre. The sensation was quite fierce and relentless. It curled through her with slow stealth, seeping into her.
Deep in her sleep, she fought against it, but there was no escape. Eventually her body accepted the invasion and allowed it to sink deeper, even though the ongoing anguish caused her to twitch and turn, so much so that she woke Banford who was sleeping peacefully.
The other woman called out her name several times.
Finally she awoke with the pain of it, and lay trembling as if she were really seared.
In the morning, however, she only remembered it as a distant memory. She arose and was busy preparing the house and attending to the fowls. Banford flew into the village on her bicycle to try and buy food. She was a hospitable soul. But alas, in the year 1918 there was not much food to buy.
The youth came downstairs in his shirt-sleeves. He was young and fresh, but he walked with his head thrust forward, so that his shoulders seemed raised and rounded, as if he had a slight curvature of the spine. It must have been only a manner of bearing himself, for he was young and vigorous. The movements of his body were strong, confident and not complicated by thought or worry. He washed himself and went outside, whilst the women were preparing breakfast.
He saw everything, and examined everything. His curiosity was quick and insatiable. He compared the state of things with that which he remembered before, and cast over in his mind the effect of the changes. He watched the fowls and the ducks, to see their condition. He noticed the flight of wood-pigeons overhead—they were very numerous. He saw the few apples high up, which March had not been able to reach. He remarked that they had borrowed a draw-pump, presumably to empty the big soft-water cistern which was on the north side of the house.
“It’s a funny, dilapidated old place,” he said to the girls, as he sat at breakfast.
His eyes were wise and childish with thinking about things. He did not say much, but ate largely. March kept her face averted. She, too, in the early morning could not be aware of him, though something about the glint of his khaki reminded her of the brilliance of her dream-fox. And that pain, she remembered enough of it to wince each time he grabbed another hunk of bread or when he reached forward for his tea. Of course his gaze was upon her, ever inquisitive. His steady stare made her discomfort greater and she often turned to Banford, asking a question she wasn’t truly interested in.
During the day the girls went about their business. In the morning he attended to the guns, shot a rabbit and a wild duck that was flying high towards the wood. That was a great addition to the empty larder. The girls felt that already he had earned his keep. He said nothing about leaving, however. In the afternoon he went to the village. He came back at teatime. He had the same alert, forward-reaching look on his roundish face. He hung his hat on a peg with a little swinging gesture. He was thinking about something.
“Well,” he said to the girls, as he sat at table. “What am I going to do?”
“How do you mean—what are you going to do?” said Banford.
“Where am I going to find a place in the village to stay?” he said.
“I don’t know,” said Banford. “Where do you think of staying?”
“Well”—he hesitated—“at the Swan they’ve got this flu, and at the Plough and Harrow they’ve got the soldiers who are collecting the hay for the army. Besides, in the private houses, there’s ten men and a corporal altogether billeted in the village, they tell me. I’m not sure where I could get a bed.”
He left the matter to them. He was rather calm about it. March sat with her elbows on the table, her two hands supporting her chin, looking at him unconsciously. Suddenly he lifted his clouded blue eyes, and unthinking looked straight into March’s eyes. The intensity of his gaze made her limbs immobile while her heart pumped wildly inside her chest. He was startled as well as she. He, too, recoiled a little but only with his body. His physical presence seemed to fill the entire room, blocking out everything and everyone—even the entire town. March felt the same sly, taunting, knowing spark leap out of his eyes, as he turned his head aside, and fall into her soul, as it had fallen from the dark eyes of the fox. She pursed her mouth as if in pain, as if asleep too.
“Well, I don’t know,” Banford was saying. She seemed reluctant, as if she were afraid of being imposed upon. She looked at March until March was finally able to look away from the young man. But, with her weak, troubled sight, Banford only saw the usual semi-abstraction on her friend’s face. “Why don’t you speak, Nellie?” she said.
But March was wide-eyed and silent, and the youth, as if fascinated, was watching her without moving his eyes.
“Go on—answer something,” said Banford. And March turned her head slightly aside, as if coming to consciousness, or trying to come to consciousness.
“What do you expect me to say?” she asked automatically.
“Say what you think,” said Banford.
“It’s all the same to me,” said March. She knew that the fox was sly and would have its way. There was not much reason to think where the fox was concerned. What was going to happen would simply happen. And she would respond one way or another.
And again there was silence. A pointed light seemed to be on the boy’s eyes, penetrating like a needle.
“So it is to me,” said Banford. “You can stop on here if you like.”
A smile like a cunning little flame came over his face, suddenly and involuntarily. He dropped his head quickly to hide it, and remained with his head dropped, his face hidden. But March knew it was there, that smile that controlled her heart, making it circulate hot blood, preparing her body for whatever it was that the man wanted to take from her. Anything and everything. He would take and take until he had everything he wanted and she would be powerless to prevent it.
“You can stop on here if you like. You can please yourself, Henry,” Banford concluded.
Still he did not reply, but remained with his head dropped. Then he lifted his face. It was bright with a curious light, as if exultant, and his eyes were strangely clear as he watched March. She turned her face aside, her mouth suffering as if wounded, and her consciousness dim.
Banford became a little puzzled. She watched the steady, pe
llucid gaze of the youth’s eyes as he looked at March, with the invisible smile gleaming on his face. She did not know how he was smiling, for no feature moved. It seemed only in the gleam, almost the glitter of the fine hairs on his cheeks. Then he looked with quite a changed look at Banford.
“I’m sure,” he said in his soft, courteous voice, “you’re awfully good. You’re too good. You don’t want to be bothered with me, I’m sure.”
“Cut a bit of bread, Nellie,” said Banford uneasily, adding, “It’s no bother, if you like to stay. It’s like having my own brother here for a few days. He’s a boy like you are.”
“That’s awfully kind of you,” the lad repeated. “I should like to stay ever so much, if you’re sure I’m not a trouble to you.”
“No, of course you’re no trouble. I tell you, it’s a pleasure to have somebody in the house beside ourselves,” said warm-hearted Banford.
“But Miss March?” he said in his soft voice, looking at her.
“Oh, it’s quite all right as far as I’m concerned,” said March vaguely. She might as well let it be all right, for she understood the fox as well as he understood her. The fox stayed wherever it was content and had all it needed.
His face beamed, and he almost rubbed his hands with pleasure.
“Well then,” he said, “I should love it, if you’d let me pay my board and help with the work.”
“You’ve no need to talk about board,” said Banford.
One or two days went by, and the youth stayed on at the farm. Banford was quite charmed by him. He was so soft and courteous in speech, not wanting to say much himself, preferring to hear what she had to say, and to laugh in his quick, half-mocking way. He helped readily with the work—but not too much. He loved to be out alone with the gun in his hands, to watch, to see. For his sharp-eyed, impersonal curiosity was insatiable, and he was most free when he was quite alone, half-hidden, watching.
Particularly he watched March. She was a strange character to him. Her figure, like a graceful young man’s, piqued him. Her dark eyes made something rise in his soul, with a curious elate excitement, when he looked into them—an excitement he was afraid to let be seen, it was so keen and secret. And her odd, shrewd speech made him laugh outright. He felt he must go further, he was inevitably impelled to go after this new prey. But he put away the thought of her and went off towards the wood’s edge with the gun.
The dusk was falling as he came home, and with the dusk, a fine, late November rain. He saw the fire-light leaping in the window of the sitting room, a leaping light in the little cluster of the dark buildings. And he thought to himself it would be a good thing to have this place for his own. Then the thought entered him shrewdly. Why not marry March?
He stood still in the middle of the field for some moments, the dead rabbit hanging still in his hand, arrested by this thought. His mind waited in amazement—it seemed to calculate—and he smiled curiously to himself in acquiescence. Why not? Why not indeed? It was a good idea. What if it was rather ridiculous? What did it matter? What if she was older than he? It didn’t matter. When he thought of her dark, startled, vulnerable eyes he smiled subtly to himself and thought of cold nights and the possibilities of the darkness. He was older than she, really. He was master of her and he would be sure she understood she did not have any control over him.
He scarcely admitted his intention even to himself. He kept it as a secret even from himself. It was all too uncertain as yet. He would have to see how things went. Yes, he would have to see how things went. If he wasn’t careful, she would just simply mock at the idea. He knew, sly and subtle as he was, that if he went to her plainly and said, ‘Miss March, I love you and want you to marry me,’ her inevitable answer would be, ‘Get out. I don’t want any of that tomfoolery.’ This was her attitude to men and their ‘tomfoolery’. If he was not careful, she would turn round on him with her savage, sardonic ridicule, and dismiss him from the farm and from her own mind for ever.
He would have to go gently, carefully, slowly. He would have to catch her as you catch a deer or a woodcock when you go out shooting. It’s no good walking out into the forest and saying to the deer, ‘Please fall to my gun’. No, it is a slow, subtle battle. A battle where one is in control and the other only believes themselves to be in control.
When you really go out to get a deer, you gather yourself together, you coil yourself inside yourself, and you advance secretly, before dawn, into the mountains. The deer is already caught even though he does not know it. It is not so much what you do, when you go out hunting, as how you feel. You have to be subtle and cunning and absolutely fatally ready. It becomes like a fate. Your own fate overtakes and determines the fate of the deer you are hunting.
First of all, even before you come in sight of your quarry, there is a strange battle, like mesmerism. Your own soul, as a hunter, has gone out to fasten on the soul of the deer, even before you see any deer. And the soul of the deer fights to escape. Even before the deer has any wind of you, it is so. It is a subtle, profound battle of wills which takes place in the invisible. And it is a battle never finished till your bullet goes home. When you are really worked up to the true pitch, and you come at last into range, you don’t then aim as you do when you are firing at a bottle. It is your own will which carries the bullet into the heart of your quarry. The bullet’s flight home is a sheer projection of your own fate into the fate of the deer. It happens like a supreme wish, a supreme act of volition, not as a dodge of cleverness.
He was a huntsman in spirit, not a farmer, and not a soldier stuck in a regiment. And it was as a young hunter that he wanted to bring down March as his quarry, to make her his wife. So he gathered himself subtly together, seemed to withdraw into a kind of invisibility. He was not quite sure how he would go on. And March was suspicious as a hare. So he remained in appearance just the nice, odd stranger-youth, staying for a fortnight on the place.
He had been sawing logs for the fire in the afternoon and his entire body had been, at one point, covered in a fine sheen of perspiration. What remained now was the scent of his exertion and the lingering effects of the satisfaction that came across a man when he had done a hard job well.
Darkness came very early. It was still a cold, raw mist. It was getting almost too dark to see. A pile of short sawed logs lay beside the trestle. March came to carry them indoors, or into the shed, as he was busy sawing the last log. He was working in his shirt-sleeves, and did not notice her approach. She came unwillingly, as if shy. When she bent down he saw the firmness of her muscles and the easy way her strong arms moved the logs. She was a fine prey indeed and they both knew it. He saw her stooping to the bright-ended logs, and he stopped sawing, letting his probing gaze rake across her. A fire like lightning flew down his legs in the nerves and he was more aware of March than he ever had been. Everything about her called to him, her scent, her body, her essence. It was not enough to be near her. He needed to possess her. Indeed, master her.
“March?” he said in his quiet, young voice.
She looked up from the logs she was piling.
“Yes!” she said.
He looked down on her in the dusk. He could see her not too distinctly and he struggled to see what he could of her. If only she would stop shrinking away from him and expose herself to him as she ought to.
“I wanted to ask you something,” he said, feeling that lightning fire burn in his limbs.
“Did you? What was it?” she said. Already the fright was in her voice. But she was too much mistress of herself. And it was that control, he realised, that he most wanted to take from her. She would weaken and give herself to him. He would see to it. As he felt that was what he wanted, he knew she must want it too.
“Why”—his voice seemed to draw out soft and subtle, it penetrated her nerves—“why, what do you think it is?”
She stood up, placed her hands on her hips, and stood looking at him transfixed, without answering. Again he burned with a sudden power.
&nbs
p; “Well,” he said, and his voice was so soft it seemed rather like a subtle touch, like the merest touch of a cat’s paw, a feeling rather than a sound. “Well—I wanted to ask you to marry me.”
March felt rather than heard him. She felt him everywhere—on her face, across her breasts, deep inside her, filling her and taking her soul. She was trying in vain to turn aside her face. A great relaxation seemed to have come over her, as though she had known this moment was coming and finally it had arrived. She stood silent, her head slightly on one side. He seemed to be bending towards her, invisibly smiling as he came for her. It seemed to her fine sparks came out of him, ready to jump across to her and burn through her skin.
Then very suddenly she said, “Don’t try any of your tomfoolery on me.”
A quiver went over his nerves. He had missed. He waited a moment to collect himself again. Then, after he had reconsidered his way of handling the matter, he said, putting all the strange softness into his voice, as if he were imperceptibly stroking her, “Why, it’s not tomfoolery. It’s not tomfoolery. I mean it. I mean it. What makes you disbelieve me?”
He sounded hurt. And his voice had such a curious power over her, making her feel loose and relaxed. She struggled somewhere for her own power. She felt for a moment that she was lost—lost—lost. The word seemed to rock in her as if she were dying. Suddenly again she spoke.
“You don’t know what you are talking about,” she said, in a brief and transient stroke of scorn. “What nonsense! I’m old enough to be your mother.”
“Yes, I do know what I’m talking about. Yes, I do,” he persisted softly, as if he were producing his voice in her blood. “I know quite well what I’m talking about. You’re not old enough to be my mother. That isn’t true. And what does it matter even if it was? You can marry me whatever age we are. What is age to me? And what is age to you? Age is nothing.”
A swoon went over her as he concluded. He spoke rapidly—in the rapid Cornish fashion—and his voice seemed to sound in her somewhere where she was helpless against it. “Age is nothing!” The soft, heavy insistence of it made her sway dimly out there in the darkness. She could not answer.
The Fox Page 3
