sweeps of shadow. It was a modeller’s drawing, of the young flesh and bones of a girl who was, indeed, beautiful. He had done her hands, too, the competent fingers holding the clay and the brush. He had sketched in her sharp breasts, under her nightdress, and the barest possible indication of the folds of the cotton as it fell over them. Elsie said she was amazed. She said, too boldly,
“May I have it?”
“Certainly not,” said Fludd. “I’m making myself a collection.” And he leafed through his sketch-book, showing her drawings she had known nothing about, Elsie bending a brooding face over the dishes, Elsie poised over a pie with a knife, Elsie feeding the chickens, with the wind in her skirts. The chickens were a miracle of economic indications of movement, a strutting one, one with its head back to crow, one with flaring wings attacking another. He had caught her own motions as he had caught the nature of the birds. She felt exposed, and that something had been taken from her.
“I didn’t know,” she said.
“Now you do. I should like you to sit for a more serious study.”
Elsie clutched her nightdress about her body. She said, somewhere between pert and indignant,
“And who will do the cooking and cleaning and shopping, I’d like to know.”
“Certainly not my family of pallid silk moths. They float about and don’t know how lucky they are. I do. Major Cain is bringing us a gaggle of lady students from the Royal College for this summer school they are planning. Would you consent to sit for all of us—myself and the lady artists? You are very unusual to look at. In a good way. Very.”
He thought for a moment.
“I’m sure Dobbin, or Major Cain, or the Vicar, can find you an auxiliary when the school people come. Then you could model for us. Delectable.”
When he had gone, Elsie, somewhat ruffled, thought he might have looked at her little pots, as well as her face, and other parts of her. He might have given her some encouragement.
She wondered if there was a career in being a model. It might not be respectable. Did she care?
They were rather lovely little pots. He should have noticed them.
19
The summer school took place. Humphry put on
Herbert Methley talked to Olive about sex. He sat next to her during rehearsals, when neither of them was needed. He took her for walks, along the rivulet, past the church, into the Marsh. His talk was at once theoretical and fleshly. Much of it was about what women desired. He said that until recently it had suited men to suppose that women felt little or no desire, were pure creatures or milch cows, that men treated as property. The ten commandments listed wives along with ox, ass, field, maidservant or manservant as things neither to be taken nor to be desired. Adulterous women were beheaded, in Semitic cultures, but not adulterous men. And yet, as a good student of Darwin, he believed that sexual desire was instilled in human beings—like other animals—by the needs of the species to propagate itself. Elsie Warren, trim and fine-waisted, in a linen hat, came rapidly towards them with a basket over her arm. Did Olive suppose, Herbert Methley asked her, that such a young woman—he studied her figure very intently as she went past, smiling politely at them—felt none of the stirrings young men felt at her age? It was very improbable. Olive herself, he said, drawing her hand through his arm, was both a wise woman, and like himself, a student of human nature. What did she think?
“I am mostly a student of inhuman nature—imaginary nature,” said Olive, evading. “I tell fairytales to children. The prince always marries the princess. Or the daft young man gets the princess because of his good nature and because he is the third son. Or the prince becomes a roe deer, or a swine, and has to be disenchanted by the clever princess. I don’t know what it has to do with what you call the needs of the species. All the tales stop off with marriage, or perhaps foretell a large number of progeny, undefined.”
They were going past a fenced field with a herd of cream-coloured cows, heavy, muddy, staring cows. In a corner, under an elm tree, one female cow was busily mounting another, making the movements a bull would make, although unequipped, and provoking—they both noticed—a quiver of response (or irritation) in the strained area under the lower cow’s tail.
“Does not that prove my point?” said Herbert Methley. “The poor things are deprived of the presence of a bull —who would in nature be there, guarding his harem and snorting defiance at other bulls. Yet they feel a need…”
Olive felt a blush mounting from her bosom to her face.
“I hope I have not shocked you. I did not mean to shock you.”
“I think you did. But I am not shocked. And I take your point. Scientifically, your example—look, she has got down, and sauntered away—is evidence for what you say it is.”
“When we can prevent the unfortunate consequences of following our instincts to what John Donne called the one true end of love—our society will be different, and we shall be transfigured.”
“By sexual freedom? Instincts are one thing. Donne uses the word, love.”
“Is not desire always love, whilst it exists? Whatever it may become. I sometimes think, there are as many ways of loving women, as there are women. And I sometimes think, if women were honest, there are as many ways of loving men as there are men.”
“Ah, but a good student of human nature needs also to study indifference, and even revulsion and distaste. For these also are instincts.”
Methley thought for a moment or two about his remark, and then attacked directly.
“I hope I inspire none of those in you?”
He laughed, not quite easily.
“Don’t be foolish,” said Olive. “We are not talking about ourselves. And we are good friends, which is yet
