House of Green Turf

the ocean of what you know already about yourself?

He felt her close to him before ever he heard or saw her. His senses homed on the awareness he had that she was there, and then he found the tall, motionless darkness, the two pale flowers of hands quiet at her sides.

‘Herr Killian…’ A muted breath hardly as loud as a whisper; and not a question, she knew who was there.

‘Fraulein Friedl…’ he said as softly.

She crossed the few yards that still separated them, and as she came the greenish, reflected light flickered over her face twice, tremulous and faint; it was like seeing a drowned face float through clear, shallow water. Thus delicately touched, Friedl achieved beauty. The flaw did not show at all, the enchanted light brushed her weatherbeaten skin with its own liquid jade.

‘Herr Killian,’ said the dream-like murmur, ‘I can tell you about the man called Aylwin… if you want to know…’

‘Yes…yes, Friedl, I want to know…’

He went the necessary, the imperative step to meet her. She walked into his arms.

‘The last time I sat here with a man,’ she said,drawing fiercely on the cigarette Francis had just lit for her, ‘it was with him. With Robert Aylwin.’

They were sitting on a felled tree in a half-circle of bushes some distance along the lake-side, looking out through a filigree of branches over the water. She had brought him there by the hand, moving like a hunting cat, silent and certain in the dark.

‘They were here three, four days. He was nice to me. We came to this place together. He was not like me, he was gay, always gay.’

No one, thought Francis, could accuse us of that particular indiscretion. Something was there with them, heavy and fatal, something of warmth and tenderness and bitterness and pity that left an indescribable, rank flavour on the night. But most surely no gaiety.

‘Aylwin had been here two or three times with Dr. Fredericks,’ he said. ‘Hadn’t you met him before?’

‘I was not here until that summer. I came when my father died. I had nothing, you understand? Not even a human face. Who would want me? But he was lively, and funny, and kind. On that last evening I was late finishing the dishes, and I saw him go out, across the terrace, down the path… as you did to-night. And when I was finished I followed him.’

‘You had an arrangement?’ asked Francis, lifting the heavy sheaves of her unbound hair in his hands.

‘No, we had no arrangement. Simply, I hoped he might come here and wait. But before I reached this place, a little way back there among the trees, I heard his voice. And another voice. A girl’s… So I drew back a little, not to break in on them, but it was quiet there, and I was among the bushes. I didn’t want them to know, and I could not get away quickly because of the branches… they would have heard me…’

His throat was dry. ‘Could you see them?’

‘No. It was also September, and a little later in the evening. No… but both voices I knew. His, of course. And hers… you could not mistake it, even speaking. She was the one from his own party, the one they said was going to be a great singer.’

He heard his own voice saying with careful concentration, for fear he should frighten her away from the issue by too great an intensity: ‘Could you hear what they were saying?’

‘No, most of the time not. All was in undertones, and it was he who talked, and she who listened, only now and again she said some few words, and with her it was impatience and disbelief…you know? He was arguing and pleading. And she did not want him, she was sending him away, but he would not go. At the end he forgot to be quiet, he cried out loudly at her: ‘… if you don’t want me!’ And she said, ‘Hush, don’t be a fool!’ And he said: ‘No, I won’t be fool enough to endure it. There’s always an alternative! That is what he said, and like that. Do you think I could imagine that?’

‘No,’ he said. His voice felt and sounded thick and muffled in his throat. ‘No, I don’t think you could.’ Carefully, carefully now, or she would catch the spark of passion and take fire, and he would get nothing more. ‘And what did she say?’

He never knew what it was that betrayed him.

Not the voice, that was level and light, interested but detached, under complete control now. Not even the mere fact that he should ask after her reactions, when it was in Robin Aylwin’s movements he was supposed to be interested. Something deeper and more fundamental than any such details, something she felt through the almost indistinguishably altered tension of the arm that circled her, a dark lightning striking from his blood into hers. This was a creature who felt with her blood and thought with her bones and flesh, and saw with some intuitive third eye under her heart like a child. For suddenly all the air was still about them, with something more than mere silence, and very slightly and stealthily all her sinews drew together, contracting into her closed being, lifting the confiding shade of her weight from his shoulder. She did not move away from him; she did not even lift her head. It would have been less frightening if she had. But all the essence of herself that she had spilled so prodigally about her on the night air, as securely as if she had been alone, drew back like ectoplasm and coiled itself defensively within her. There was a third person there, almost palpable between them.

‘She laughed,’ said Friedl in a clear hard voice.

‘No…!’ he said involuntarily. There seemed to be two Friedls there now, one of them warm against his shoulder with the black waterfall of her hair streaking across his chest, one of them standing off at the edge of the clearing, watching him narrowly, waiting to see him react in anger or pain. There was not much she did not know now, in that dark blood-knowledge of hers, about his relationship with the absent woman who had laughed.

‘Yes! You wished to know about him, I am telling you what happened. Nobody else can tell you, nobody else knows. She laughed at him, that girl. And then I heard the bushes crashing as he turned and ran away from her, down towards the lake. Only for a few moments, because the ground drops there, and this hillock where we are cuts off sound. There was this thrashing among the bushes, and sometimes his feet stumbling against a tree-root, and then it was quiet because he was down there close to the water, under the curve of the ground. But if there are voices in a boat on the lake, then you hear them. That night there were no boats, no voices, it was already dark. It was another kind of sound we heard, that girl and I, coming up from the water. A splash. Not so great a sound, clean, not broken, not repeated… but all the same, it was not a fish rising, even though there are very big fish in the lake. It was too late, too dark, and besides, one gets to know all such sounds. No, this was