In the morning he had forgotten these thoughts; but he was soon to remember them again, for when he walked into the shop, there, behind the polished counter and laying out rolls of flannel and sarcenet, was his nymph. He recognised her as one recognises a melody; her looks, her gestures, fulfilled everything he had sought for overnight, as though a tune that he had tried unavailingly to recall had come back into his head complete. With the recognition came the identification; his mind’s nymph was Miss Edna Cave, the young lady who sold staylaces and suchlike female oddments in a dark secluded corner of his shop that in high-flown moments he referred to as the “haberdashery department”. There she was, and, what was even stranger to him, there she had been for a couple of months. She was a very respectable, quiet-spoken girl, and a good worker, though she had somehow a rather languid air. He remembered wondering when he engaged her if she were anaemic, and if she would be strong enough to lift down the heavy boxes from the shelves. And from then till this moment he had scarcely given her a thought, perhaps because of her very merits as a satisfactory worker and respectable young person.
He wanted to think of her now, to examine her in this new and exciting aspect of a discovery. But it was market day, and the shop soon filled with customers. He was kept busy and could scarcely steal a glance at his nymph until the moment came for him to put up the shutters and for her to put on her hat and gloves.
“You look a little tired, Miss Cave. It’s been a busy day, I’m sure. There’s more than twenty pounds in the till.”
“I’m not tired, really,” replied the nymph. “Only a little sleepy. It’s the spring, I expect. These first warm days often make me feel a little queer.”
“You should go out more,” said Mr Mulready. “Have you a bicycle?”
“Yes, I’ve got a bicycle.”
“I’ll tell you what you should do. Tomorrow is early closing. Now, will you come out for a ride?”
“I must say that Annie will come too,” he thought; but before he could utter the words the nymph had answered, “Thank you, Mr Mulready. I should like to very much.”
Even so, he fully intended to ask Annie, or, if not Annie, then Sophy. It would be nice for her to have the company of girls her own age – bright, friendly girls like his two. But on the morrow he learned from their talk at breakfast that they proposed to go off early in the forenoon to shop in Bath, and would not be back till late. Apparently it had all been settled long ago, even to the hats they were going to buy: a pink chip for Annie, and for Sophy a leghorn with a wreath of white roses.
“You won’t mind, will you, Pa? Mrs Creak will see to your tea.”
“I don’t know whether I shall want tea, my dear. I was thinking of going out for a ride with –”
The shop bell rang. A little boy had been sent in a great hurry for some narrow black elastic, and Mr Mulready did not have another chance of a word with his daughters. It seemed as though Fate had taken the affair in hand. It would be a pity to disappoint the poor thing, and on such a lovely day, too. But would it be right to ride with her alone? He tried to quiet his scruples by remembering the innocence of his intentions and the number of years that he had been a respectable widower. Yet in a small town one cannot be too careful; and he would be sorry to compromise a nymph. Besides, it would be dull work for her, riding through the spring lanes with such an old fogey as he; she would enjoy herself more when the girls could come too.
Just before closing time Miss Cave approached him.
“Would it be as convenient, Mr Mulready, if we don’t start till about five? Mother wants me to help with the ironing.”
He would have spoken then, but suddenly she raised her eyes and said, “I am looking forward to it so much.”
No, he could not make difficulties now. After that stint of ironing, the hot room, the heavy sheets to handle and fold, a bicycle ride would be just what she needed.
It was after five when they set out.
“Where shall we go, Miss Cave? Is there anywhere you specially fancy?”
“I should like to go –” she had a low voice and spoke with a curious slight lisp, her speech seeming as it were to rustle – “I should like to go by Glastonbury to that wood called Merley Wood.”
“It’s rather a rough road, you know. Have you been there before?”
“No. But I’ve heard of it; and I have often wanted to go there.”
He knew the wood she spoke of; that is, he had often passed below it, had heard it murmuring aloofly to itself, had seen the long shadow it stretched down to the road. He was not a fearful man; yet for some reason he did not much care to pass Merley Wood towards dusk. It gave him an uneasy feeling in his back, and he had once declared in the safety of jest that he wouldn’t walk through it – no, not for a five-pound note. But if Miss Cave wanted to go there, that was another matter. When one has a nymph vouchsafed one for a whole evening one does not boggle over details. He was extremely happy and excited at the thought of such a shy and rare being becoming his companion. Now he would really be able to watch, to discover, to make sure of her – or, rather, of the nymph-idea she represented for him. Whatever she did or said would be, he felt sure, the right, the revealing thing. He had already a general idea how a nymph would behave: she would be rather quiet, and take a great interest in flowers.
Yet when Miss Cave, riding ahead of him, suddenly jumped off her bicycle, he cried out, “Is it a puncture?”
She did not answer. It seemed that she had not heard him. She stood looking into the hedge and smiling at whatever it was she saw there.
“White violets,” she said softly. And then she smiled again, and gently nodded her head, as though between them and her there were some especial understanding. Mr Mulready also nodded – nodded in approval. Yes, it was just as it should be; a nymph would certainly behave thus. It was a pretty sight, and he hoped she would do it again.
She did, jumping off her bicycle, as other people jump off when they see a friend, to greet a flicker of windflowers in an ash coppice, a new growth of Queen Anne’s lace – very light and feathery, yet eminently vigorous with the thrusting strength of its sappy green stems – a handful of wild white hyacinths that some child must have gathered and then thrown down in the road to die. But these she took up without any word at all, and for a moment she looked almost severe as she considered them, drooping limply and exhaling their heavy smell of sweetness and untimely death, before she laid them among the grasses at the side of the road.
“It’s a thing I don’t like at all,” said Mr Mulready, “picking flowers just to throw down.”
“No more don’t I!”
He was surprised at the passion in her voice. He had never heard her speak so vehemently – nor, it occurred to him, in such a rustic way. But in a moment she was her ordinary self again, had mounted her bicycle and was pedalling on before him with her white thread gloves on the handlebars. She rode very fast for a girl of her build. He had quite an ado to keep up with her, and by the time they reached Merley Wood he was hot, and glad of a respite.
They ran their machines into the field below the wood and laid them down under a group of blossoming thorns. A blackthorn hedge straggled up the slope towards the wood; the blossom was beginning to go over, and drifts of tarnished snow lay under the bushes. But in the shadow of the wood, where the sun had not penetrated, the thorn trees were at the perfection of their bloom. They were very old trees, gnarled, and tufted with greenish-grey moss, dry and dead-coloured. It did not seem possible that those angular boughs should have put out the lacework of milky blossoms, each a blunt star, each with its little pointed pink star within it. It seemed rather as though light had rested upon the dead boughs and turned into blossom.
Behind this flowery rampart the wood rose up – sycamore, and sad spruce, and larches sighing and swaying their young green overhead. It was certainly a mournful wood, but Mr Mulready could not now imagine why he had thought it to be a frightening one. Now that he was within it, walking about with Mis
s Cave, he thought of it as a gentle place. Presently they sat down side by side, and, having sat a little while, lay back, as everyone does, sooner or later, in a wood, to stare up at the treetops waving so high above them.
Mr Mulready watched till he began to feel a trifle sick. He sat up again, and as he did so it occurred to him that he had come out this evening to watch, not larches, but a nymph. And this was a good moment to begin; for she lay staring upward as though she had forgotten his presence – he could look as much as he pleased without being ill-mannered.
First, then, how slender she was, and how supple; for she lay among the wood sorrel as though lying on the ground could never make her stiff, could never give her rheumatism. And next? What struck him next? Her pallor – she was as white as the thorn blossom. But down here at the foot of the trees the light was dim and watery, as if it floated down to them through still, shadowed water. That was why she looked so pale. No real woman had naturally such a moonlight look.
And then? Her hair, which he now saw was not black, as he had believed, but the colour of very dark earth? Her eyes, which were a bright, spangled hazel? Her wide, thin mouth; the line of her jaw, travelling from the small chin to an ear that was quite as fine as Miss Perceval’s? He noticed all these things, but he knew that there was something else, something more significant than any of these. Of course. Her silence. For, except for that one outburst over the wild hyacinths, she had scarcely put two words together during the whole evening. Yet you wouldn’t call her uncompanionable. When he had spoken she had answered him, though not in words, now he came to think of it; but assenting with sighs of contentment, and acquiescent murmurs, and even little grunts – matching her speech, as it were, to that of the whispering and faintly creaking trees around them.
How still she lay! He could hear her light breathing among the sounds of the breathing wood. Had it not been for her eyes, still open and fixed upon the treetops, he would have said she slept.
Outside the woods, among the thorns, a blackbird had begun his vespers; and the rays of the sun slanted in and turned the larch stems pink. Time was getting on; they should soon be thinking of the ride home. When she woke, when she came out of her waking dream, he would take out his watch tactfully.
But suddenly she turned to him, saying, “I am so happy here.”
One couldn’t answer that by taking out one’s watch: it wouldn’t be manners.
He made a nice reply – hoped they might have another ride soon. A second blackbird was answering the first from the farther side of the wood. Their voices travelled through the solitary still dusk where these two sat, unguessed-at and secluded as though they lay at the bottom of a shadowy pool.
“Listen to those two chaps,” said Mr Mulready. “There’s singing for you! Are you fond of music?”
“I’m afraid not. At least, I don’t care for the piano.”
He wondered if he should tell her how a phrase from a piece of music had brought them here together. But perhaps she wouldn’t understand, for he was a poor hand at explanations; and perhaps it might wound her feelings if it came out that he had invited her for such a queer reason.
“Thy nymph is light and shadowlike.” He began to hum to himself, softly and strayingly. Music has a different meaning, a different beauty, out of doors.
The sun had faded out of the wood, the stems of the larches were grown silvery, the wood sorrel they lay upon lost all earthly colour, became grey, became almost black. The smell of the thorn blossom drifted into the wood. Every moment it became more intense and more searching, as though it were the smell of the moonlight.
The nymph sat up and looked about her. She put her hands to her forehead as though to wipe away a dream. Then, shaking her head, she rose and began to walk out of the wood. Mr Mulready picked up her hat and gloves and followed her. When he came to the edge of the wood he caught his breath and started. The thorn blossom shone so in the moonlight that it looked unearthly. The landscape lay before him, undulating to the horizon in swaths of grey and silver like the swaths of mown hay. Down in the field he could see the two bicycles. Their spokes glittered in the moonlight. The dew was falling, and they would be rusted.
He began to descend the slope, but stopped again; for the nymph delayed. She had turned back towards the thorn trees at the edge of the wood. She stood beside them, quite still, gazing at them as she had gazed at the white violets, earlier in the day – gazing as though, rather than seeing them, she were listening to them. Now she began to walk towards them, very slowly. She put out her hands. He thought that she was going to break off a spray, and, remembering the country belief that whoever takes home blackthorn blossom carries death into the house, he had a confused idea that he must call to her, warn her, tell her not to. And then in a moment she had disappeared.
He saw it happen, but he could not believe his eyes. He told himself that she must have slipped round to the other side of the brake, and as he ran back across the dewy grass he kept on saying, “Oh no, oh no! It can’t be! It can’t!”
But though he called, and searched, and fought his way into the strong mass of the thorn thicket, frantically believing that she had got in somehow and fallen there in a faint, there was no sign of her. She was gone. With his own eyes he had seen her vanish.
Breathless, and scratched all over, and trembling, at last he sat down on the grass; and, covering his eyes with his bleeding hands, he began to whimper like a lost child. But it was she – she who was lost! And as he abandoned his mind to an acceptance of what had happened he began to forecast in a confused terror all the things that would happen next: a scandal, nobody believing him; Edna’s mother weeping and wailing, and perhaps bringing an action; his customers leaving him; his daughters disgraced and turning from him; misery, shame, ruin! The scent from the thorn trees flowed out over him. He caught hold of a branch and clasped it in his arms, awkwardly, as though he would embrace it. The thorns ran into his flesh and the petals slipped floating down on to the ground. “Oh, come back, come back!” he implored. But there was no answer, no sound, except the nightingales singing in the wood.
Afternoon in Summer
HE BECAME AWARE that sally had emerged from her book and was about to say something.
“Murder is an occupational risk for prostitutes.”
“Hmmm,” said he, clinging to the thread of his calculations. They grew so engrossing that when next she spoke it took him by surprise.
“And for wives, too – though not so much so.”
Inwardly assenting, Willie asked, “What on earth are you reading now?”
“A book about all the murders committed in the last thirty years. I got it from the public library.”
“Is it interesting?”
“Yes. In rather a stark way. Just facts and sentences.”
“Sounds enthralling.”
“But murder is not so much of an occupational risk for murderers. I mean, they mostly aren’t hanged. Of course, that’s a good thing.”
He looked at Sally’s sleek flaxen head, now bent over her book again. Though he was still young, still a student, he was a year older than she and found her artless sophistications touching. It was as though the mental processes beneath that hood of silken hair were as sleek, as smoothly disposed, as childishly combed and clean.
He worked on. She read. The alarm clock ticked. After an hour had passed he realised that it was two-thirty and that he was unfed.
“Are there any cases in your nice book about husbands who ate their wives? I’d like to know their sentences.”
“Oh, Willie, are you hungry?”
Her gaze rested on him, calmly attentive, as if this were another interesting social phenomenon. She put a marker in the book and closed it. He cleared his papers off the table and laid them on the floor. The dwelling they had rented for the summer vacation was advertised as “self-contained”. It was so self-contained that the only place for their bicycles was in the bathroom-kitchenette. Skirting the bicycles, Sally now opened a
small refrigerator, and considered its contents: a heel of cheese, some rye biscuit, one tomato. She put these on a tray and after further consideration added salt.
The tomato was scrupulously shared between them. It seemed of an Oriental richness and succulence.
“I had a shopping list. But when I was halfway there this morning I remembered the bloody grocer shuts on Thursdays.”
“May Hell be hot for him,” said Willie, mildly. “Never mind, I’ll tell you what we’ll do. We’ll cycle along the road towards Cowfold, and have an enormous tea at The Goat.”
“That inn we passed with the roses?”
“And the check curtains.”
“And the frogs.”
“And the milking stool.”
There was no such adventitious rusticity about the dacha they had rented from Miss Hobson, professor of Lit. Hum. at Willie’s red-brick university. Plain as a packing case, with an air of having lost all interest in going further, it stood at the end of a long flinty track across flinty fields of sugar beet. “Wonderful views of the sky,” Miss Hobson had remarked.
With only one puncture, they reached the crossroads and turned towards Cowfold. The sun beat on their backs, midges stuck to their faces. Strong Indian tea and strawberries and cream, thought Sally. Strong Indian tea, plum cake, and ham sandwiches, thought Willie. The Goat appeared in the heavens, motionless on its signpost against a glaring blue sky. There were the roses, there was the lily pond, with concrete frogs. They dismounted. Swaying with hunger and heat-stroke, they walked up the crazy-paving path. On the doors was a notice: “NO TEAS”.
Sally moaned and sank down on the milking stool.
Willie looked at his watch. “Twenty to five,” he said. “They’re legally bound to open at six. We’ll kill time till then. Think of those poor wretches who go to the moon.”
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