Long Summer Day (A Horseman Riding By)

by R. F Delderfield

  He slept then, almost on the instant and she slipped gently from him, aware of the evening chill rising out of the Valley and striking cold on her back. She paused a moment to look down on him, noting the tiny fronds of dead bracken adhering to his chest and hair so that suddenly he looked a boy again, younger by far than her and she hastened to cover him with another of her sacks. She did not regard what had happened as momentous and could contemplate it without fear or regret. She did not invest it with any special significance. He had always been her man and she was aware that men’s desires and demands changed as they grew older. It was just that today, unexpectedly, a few draughts of hedgerow wine had hastened his growth and he had moved on, taking her with him as was the order of things. She did not look for a solution to their committal for she had never troubled herself about solutions and explanations of human or animal conduct, taking each new experience as it came and extracting from it what she needed and what life was disposed to give her. It had granted her him and for a long time now she had accepted the inevitability of this bounty and the limitations that accompanied it, for she supposed now that he would demand access to her every time they met and that she would grow accustomed to being seized by him and crushed under him, with dry bracken stalks scratching her back and her body a soft target for his explosive energy. She did not resent this in any way. All she knew of life in the woods and on the moors taught her that violent possession of the female was the unquestionable right of the male and if, beyond this acceptance, there was a single spark of sadness it was struck by his impatience that had involved pain, certainly to her but perhaps also to him. Yet she knew instinctively that this need not always be so, that it would not necessarily be a clumsily contrived act and that perhaps, when the wine was out of him, they could find ways to prolong preliminaries that had brought her infinitely more joy and satisfaction than the climax. She shook out her hair and pulled on the ruin of her dress thinking with yearning of his smooth, white body under her hands and of the way she had gentled every part of him while he lay still staring up at her as though she was an angel appearing out of a cloud. And as she thought this she lifted and studied the hands that had touched him, extending her fingers and bringing them to her lips, smiling secretly as she performed this act of homage. Then with a final glance at him, she made her way out into the open and through the gorse to the slope. She knew somehow that he would not want to find her there when he awoke.

  He got back to his room without disturbing anyone, remembering little of his scramble through the rhododendrons, and round the edge of the mere in almost total darkness. Once or twice he fell and bruised himself and on the climb up the escarpment to the edge of the woods he was clawed by innumerable briars but he struggled on, careless of hurts so long as he could reach the privacy of his room and lock the door against intruders and thought.

  She had been right about the comparative harmlessness of the devil’s brew that had drawn him into this terrifying situation. There was no hangover; his head did not ache and although his mouth felt parched there was no sour taste on his palate as there had been when he, and Manners, and Hicks Minor, had drunk three pints of stout in the fourth form and gone reeling to bed. But the lack of a hangover was a trifling compensation when he was weighed down by so much guilt and shame and by so many desperate fears that rushed at him like gusts of wind from behind every tree. He did not know whether her absence, when he awoke to find himself naked under her sacks, had been a relief or not. He would have found the greatest difficulty, he thought, in meeting her reproachful eyes, but it was pitch dark by then and they could have talked, and she might, somehow, have been able to reassure him, although he doubted very much if she would have forgiven him his handling of her. He thought savagely of his worldly-wise cronies in the Sixth, who boasted so lightly of their conquests of shop-girls and street-walkers. Either they were liars, which he was disposed to believe, or they were made very differently from him, without consciences, and without any sense of moral responsibility towards other people. For a few minutes only after finding himself alone in the cave and the Valley below dark and silent, he had attempted to dismiss the incident as an initiation into the world of men. He had got drunk on Meg Potter’s nectar. He had kissed and fondled a girl. And finally he had pushed the encounter to its logical conclusion. After all, she was only a Potter and everyone in the valley knew that the Potter girls were to be had for a shilling. But soon he recognised this as a deliberate distortion of the truth, knowing that what had happened after the wine had started a fire in his loins had not been a casual encounter with an accommodating girl but something approaching a rape, with her a virgin crying out as she was ravished, and, what was worse, ravished by someone whom she trusted. If his memory of all that had taken place had been at all clear he might have found ample self-justification in the fact that it had been she who had undressed him, she who had pushed him down on the floor and then virtually offered herself but the devil of it was he was by no means clear on the details, only upon the fact. That brew of Meg’s seemed to have scoured his memory of all that had occurred between his swallowing of the second mugful, and her sharp, single cry as he took possession of her. He could hear that cry now and it tormented him all the way down the sunken lane and across the orchard to the stable-yard. Then, as he reached his room, guilt was driven out by fear and the most urgent of his fears was that she should find herself with a child, his child, whom he would have to acknowledge before Squire, the elegant Mrs Craddock, Doctor Maureen, Hazel’s family and, indeed, the Valley at large! What would follow if this dread possibility materialised he did not know. He would, he supposed, be thrown out of the house, for surely Squire Craddock would be outraged to discover that the protégé upon whom he had lavished so much affection and money had behaved in such a base fashion. Ignorance buttressed his fears for in spite of the long talks over the study fires in his last year at school he still did not know whether a baby was the inevitable sequel to what he had done. He hoped and prayed not, telling himself that if this was the case then the world would be overpopulated in a matter of years, and he clung to this straw of comfort while he pulled off his clothes and stealthily washed himself in cold water. Then, as he climbed into bed, it occurred to him that if the worst happened perhaps he might not be turned out of the house, but reviled and herded to the altar to be married to Hazel Potter out of hand. Possibly her mother and brothers (and almost certainly the Squire and Mrs Craddock) would insist upon marriage and for a moment the pricks and stabs of guilt and fear ceased to assault him as he tried to picture their life together as man and wife. He supposed he loved her for how else could he have behaved with such criminal recklessness? And he was convinced that she still loved him, in spite of his brutality but he also knew that there was a good deal more to marriage than rolling about on a couple of sacks spread on dried bracken. How and where would they lie? How did one earn enough money to maintain a wife and the children resulting from every encounter such as the last?

  He found sleep impossible and watched the dawn draw the curtains on his window. Away across the fields, in the yard of the Home Farm, a cock shrilled and birds began to rustle and sing in the creeper above the porch. He got up, sluiced his face and dressed, leaning his elbows on the sill and looking across Big Paddock to the river. It was still only five-thirty and he had an hour or so before people crowded back into his life and addressed him, expecting lucid, everyday replies. He knew that before then he must find some kind of solution to his problems and he thought, for a moment, of flight. Then he remembered that there was no immediate urgency, for a baby, so they said, was nine months in the making and with this thought came another, a recollection of something Tovey Major had said about virgins being unable to have children. He was unsure how much reliance could be placed upon this or in what measure it affected him, but he began to cheer up a little, a very little and returned to his bed, lying fully-dressed on the rumpled sheets with his hands clasped behind his head as he search
ed among his memories for significant details. He found none but some of his fears, and a little of his guilt, began to recede and as the room grew lighter he found to his astonishment that he could look back upon the incident with a certain amount of detachment. The more he succeeded in doing this the less urgent it seemed and slowly his panic began to subside so that he could think of Hazel with tepid warmth and of his savage use of her with a certain amount of awe. He said, half-aloud, ‘I shall have to leave here at once for if I don’t I know very well what will happen, I’ll go to that damned cave again and it will happen as often as I go with or without that jar of hedgerow wine the little fool introduced into the place! After all, it was the liquor that began it all for without that stuff inside me I should have stopped short after kissing her, or maybe fondling her a little. Surely the best thing is to disappear and I can tell Squire first thing I’ve decided on the R.E.s, and that I need three months’ cramming before sitting Army Entrance! I can give him the name of Manners’ crammer, near Eastbourne, and go there at once.’ But then, as he rejoiced in this easy escape route, he remembered Hazel Potter’s brown eyes looking across the rim of her mug when he was supping his second gill and he knew that he could not leave without explaining to her why and where he was going. He would have to see her once again, and tell her how sorry he was, and perhaps kiss her but very gently and impersonally on the cheek. He hoped she would understand and agree that things could not be left as they were. If she did not then he would go away, leaving her to make the best of it.

  He knew where he could find her at this hour. If she had not slept at the cave then she must have gone to the Dell and after what had happened he guessed that she would not remain there long but would make her way back to the woods at first light. He would try the Dell first and if he drew blank he would go to the cave. He slipped out and down the backstairs, cutting round the house and crossing the sloping meadow to enter the scrub on the west side of the Bluff where the field path joined the Dell track. Having made a decision he felt almost lighthearted and it was difficult to remain gloomy in the early morning woods, where it seemed as if every bird in the Valley had congregated to swell the clamour. He waited here, watching a woodpecker at work, and presently he heard her coming along the track and moved behind a bush for his curiosity regarding her had increased rather than diminished and presently she came in view, dawdling along and actually crooning to herself, as though she found the world a particularly pleasant place that morning.

  ‘Damn it,’ he said to himself, ‘here’s me, worried half out of my wits about her and feeling the biggest cad on earth and here she comes strolling along singing! What the devil am I so bothered about?’, and he called, ‘Hi there! Hazel!’

  She stopped, turning her head slowly and her mouth curved in a warm, welcoming smile as he edged out of ambush and stood uncertainly in her path.

  ‘Youm right early, Ikey!’ she said, as though she had half-expected him, ‘Ave ’ee come from my little house?’ and he said, sulkily that he had not, that he had awakened to find her gone and blundered home in the dark but had not slept a wink because he was worried about what had happened. ‘It was that awful stuff of your mother’s,’ he excused himself, ‘and I … I’m sorry, Hazel, upon my honour I am! It was a cad’s trick and that’s a fact!’

  She was puzzled by his troubled expression and far more so by his words, for there was nothing, as far as she could remember, to be sorry about. His manner, however, must have enlisted her sympathy for she took his hand as they moved along the path towards the squirrel oak, saying, ‘Lord, Ikey, what’s ’ee long-faced about, boy? You on’y got tipsy, didden ’ee?’

  ‘I … I don’t mean about getting drunk on that stuff,’ he protested, indignantly, ‘I mean … well … you must know what I mean! I wasn’t so drunk that I can’t remember what happened and it was the first time ever, you understand?’

  ‘Well,’ she said, mildly, ‘’twas the first time for me but what of it? It baint nothing to worry over, be it?’

  For several minutes he could make no reply. The gulf between them, between her view of life and the tight, circumscribed code of people who lived in houses, sat at tables and made polite conversation with one another was unbridgeable and the realisation of this renewed his feelings of guilt and apprehension. He said at length, ‘Look, Hazel love, I … I’ve got to go away, I’ve got to study to be a soldier and I’ll be gone some time. That’s why I came to meet you— I thought, well, that maybe you’d think I was staying away from you because of what happened.’

  She was undismayed by the news. Ever since she had known him he had always been going and coming and the passage of time meant very little to her. He had been with her last evening, he was here now and would be gone tomorrow but he would come back, sooner or later, as he always did and today she felt particularly sure of him. They stopped on the edge of the wood where the heavy timber began its march down the slope to the mere.

  ‘You’ll come zoon as ’ee gets ’ome?’

  ‘Yes, of course I will.’ Suddenly, and inexplicably he felt totally reassured and with reassurance came tenderness and concern. ‘Hazel’, he said, urgently, ‘why don’t you go home and live with Meg and the girls? And why don’t you go back to school at Miss Willoughby’s? You can’t always live in the woods, you know, you’re grown up now!’

  She said wonderingly, ‘Go back home? Wi’ all that ole racket? Go back to skuel? Now whyfore should I do that?’

  ‘Because I should like you to,’ he said, ‘because I want you to … I want you to read and write like everyone else. Will you think about it while I’m away?’

  ‘Ooahh,’ she said, lightly, ‘mebbe I will, tho’ I doan zee much zense in it! Dornee like me as I be?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said desperately, ‘of course I like you but … well … I’m thinking about what’s to become of you if you go on living rough and wandering about the way you do.’

  She interpreted this as caution on his part against the possibility of some other young man in the Valley waylaying her and demanding of her what he had been granted and the thought made her smile.

  ‘Giddon,’ she said scornfully, ‘I baint afraid o’ no one an’ a worn’t let none of ’em come near me, same as I told ’ee last night! I c’n run faster an’ any humping gurt man in the Valley and I keeps meself to meself, mostly! Will ’ee be goin’ outalong now? Or shall us go to my li’l house?’

  ‘I’m going now,’ he said, sighing, and she said, ‘Oo-ah,’ putting up her face to be kissed.

  He kissed her gently. Not, as he had promised himself, on the cheek but on the mouth. Her breath was as sweet as the morning air and he held her for a moment until he began to tremble again and stood back, dropping his hands to his sides and looking at the ground, but she did not seem to notice his confusion and said, gaily, ‘Well, dornee forget then, zoon as ’ee comes back. I’ll save what’s left in the jar for ’ee. T’won’t ’urt fer waitin’!’ Then, as in their early days, she was gone, melting into the foliage and he was alone, as bewildered as when he set out but no longer weighed down by shame and fear. He thought, ‘There’s nobody like her, nobody the least like her but I wouldn’t have her any different so to hell with everything!’ He went slowly down the field to the sunken lane and into the orchard by the stile.