“You are so gloomy,” I continued. “So—oh, I don’t know—about everything. It’s because you are always cooped up in one place, I suppose. One must take the world—a little—as it is, you know. Why don’t you go away; travel; see things? Oh, if I were a man.”
His eyes watched my lips. Everything seemed to have turned sour. To have waited and dreamed; to have actually changed my clothes and come scuttling out in a silly longing excitement—for this. Why, I felt more lonely and helpless under Wanderslore’s evening sky than ever I had been in my cedarwood privacy in No. 2.
“I mean it, I mean it,” I broke out suddenly. “You domineer over me. You pamper me up with silly stories—‘trailing clouds of glory,’ I suppose. They are not true. It’s everyone for himself in this world, I can tell you; and in future, please understand, I intend to be my own mistress. Simply because in a little private difficulty I asked you to help me—”
He turned irresolutely. “They have dipped you pretty deep in the dye-pot.”
“And what, may I ask, do you mean by that?”
“I mean,” and he faced me, “that I am precisely what your friend, Miss Bowater, called me. What more is there to say?”
“And pray, am I responsible for everything my friends say? And to have dragged up that wretched fiasco after we had talked it out to the very dregs! Oh, how I have been longing and longing to come home. And this is what you make of it.”
He turned his face towards the west, and its vast light irradiated his sharp-boned features, the sloping forehead beneath the straight, black hair. Fume as I might, resentment fainted away in me.
“You don’t seem to understand,” I went on; “it’s the waste—the waste of it all. Why do you make it so that I can’t talk naturally to you, as friends talk? If I am alone in the world, so are you. Surely we can tell the truth to one another. I am utterly wretched.”
“There is only one truth that matters: you do not love me. Why should you? But that’s the barrier. And the charm of it is that not only the Gods, but the miserable Humans, if only they knew it, would enjoy the sport.”
“Love! I detest the very sound of the word. What has it ever meant to me, I should like to know, in this—this cage?”
“Scarcely a streak of gilding on the bars,” he sneered miserably. “Still we are sharing the same language now.”
The same language. Self-pitying tears pricked into my eyes; I turned my head away. And in the silence, stealthily, out of a dark woody hollow nearer the house, as if at an incantation, broke a low, sinister, protracted rattle, like the croaking of a toad. I knew that sound; it came straight out of Lyndsey—called me back.
“S-sh!” I whispered, caught up with delight. “A nightjar! Listen. Let’s go and look.”
I held out my hand. His sent a shiver down my spine. It was clammy cold, as if he had just come out of the sea. Thrusting our way between the denser clumps of weeds, we pushed on cautiously until we actually stood under the creature’s enormous oak. So elusive and deceitful was the throbbing croon of sound that it was impossible to detect on which naked branch in the black leafiness the bird sat churring. The wafted fragrances, the placid dusky air, and far, far above, the delicate, shallowing deepening of the faint-starred blue—how I longed to sip but one drop of drowsy mandragora and forget this fretting, inconstant self.
We stood, listening; and an old story I had read somewhere floated back into memory. “Once, did you ever hear it?” I whispered close to him, “there was a ghost came to a house near Cirencester. I read of it in a book. And when it was asked, ‘Are you a good spirit or a bad?’ it made no answer, but vanished, the book said—I remember the very words—‘with a curious perfume and most melodious twang.’ With a curious perfume,” I repeated, “and most melodious twang. There now, would you like me to go like that? Oh, if I were a moth, I would flit in there and ask that old Death-thing to catch me. Even if I cannot love you, you are part of all this. You feed my very self. Mayn’t that be enough?”
His grip tightened round my fingers; the entrancing, toneless dulcimer thrummed on.
I leaned nearer, as if to raise the shadowed lids above the brooding eyes. “What can I give you—only to be your peace? I do assure you it is yours. But I haven’t the secret of knowing what half the world means. Look at me. Is it not all a mystery? Oh, I know it, even though they jeer and laugh at me. I beseech you be merciful, and keep me what I am.”
So I pleaded and argued, scarcely heeding the words I said. Yet I realize now that it was only my mind that wrestled with him there. It was what came after that took the heart out of me. There came a clap of wings, and the bird swooped out of its secrecy into the air above us, a moment showed his white-splashed, cinder-coloured feathers in the dusk, seemed to tumble as if broken-winged upon the air, squawked, and was gone. The interruption only hastened me on.
“Still, still listen,” I implored: “if Time would but cease a while and let me breathe.”
“There, there,” he muttered. “I was unkind. A filthy jealousy.”
“But think! There may never come another hour like this. Know, know now, that you have made me happy. I can never be so alone again. I share my secretest thoughts—my imagination, with you; isn’t that a kind of love? I assure you that it is. Once I heard my mother talking, and sometimes I have wondered
