Getting mushrooms? He decided, for the first time, that mushrooms grew. And that he must carry on, attentively. With immense deliberation the sun was moving west. He stretched his neck out of the window, and saw the crest of the down turn black, and draw up like a tower. He drew in his head. He did not want to see that hill with the stars trembling over it. How did they light the place? I know moonlight, I know starlight. Very sensitive to the arts, he admitted that he soon might be justified in singing that. Lay this body down. What an idea, but he might soon have to do it. To him, straight from London, Paris, and New York, the silence was intolerable.
The wood sighed at him. Just like that. Two kinds of life he did not want. The ash-fair tree-tall young woman downstairs, and the elaborate piece of leaf and wood, that was one thing and many. The wood and the woman might be interchangeable, and it wasn’t the sort of thing you wanted on a visit. He had nerves, too, a great sensibility to take impressions. Always in relation to people. Life to him was an elaborate theatre, without scenery. Here the scenery seemed to be the play.
He got as far as that when he remembered that downstairs there would be certainly something to drink, and began to change, beautifying himself, scrupulously and elaborately as a cat.
He had a cocktail; he had two. A woman came in. Scylla told him she was her old nurse. Was it truth, or a comedy, when she said:
“I found the lobster and the fish Mr. Felix got in the ditch.”
And Scylla answered:
“Where are Mr. Felix and Mr. Ross?”
And the nurse had said:
“You never know. I’ll bring in dinner.”
So they ate together; an eatable meal, fresh-tasting wine, and the inevitable whisky after. A rabbit crossed the lawn. A rat came under the verandah and stole a piece of bread. Two bats flew in. Scylla said:
“They’re full of lice, worse luck.”
Nothing went on happening: the delicate quiet waited on them.
“I expect,” said Scylla, “that they went over to Tollerdown, and found our friends had come to the cottage.”
He thought: The mushrooms are wearing thin.
“Where is Tollerdown?”
“One of the hills in this part of the world. You know this country was given its first human character in the late stone age. That’s all the earthworks and barrows you see. Two of our friends have a cottage there. They dress up like the Prince of Wales, and quarrel like dogs. It will be fun if they are there.”
Well, it might be. Anything which would give Dudley Carston a human scene. And if there was one thing in history one could hope was over, it was the stone age. But the young woman’s mind was distracted by the thought of it. She was laughing to herself. Laughing at the stone age. Real, abstract laughter. She had forgotten he was there. That her brother and her friend had disappeared. She might be mad, but she was good-looking. Women lovely and mad, or only lovely and only mad, should not be left alone in woods. Literature did not help him. He could only think of La Belle Dame sans merci, and she wasn’t that kind. She should think of him as a real man, not one of her flighty shadows too careless to be there to receive the stranger they had invited to follow them some hundred miles.
“Shall I go and look for them?” he said.
“Where?” she said—That brought it back—“The openness here is deceptive, and they might come a hundred ways. I’m ashamed of their manners.”
She was telling herself: Something has happened, I think. I told myself this morning I’d watch the scene and not try to make it right. My boy friends can go hang.
The silence went away, and left nothing.
There was an iron clang. Carston sat tight.
“It’s the gate on to the grass,” she said, “here they are.”
Two heavy men syncopating their walk. Must be a march of trolls in the night through the wood. Nothing natural was coming. Four tall young men crowded into the room.
“So you’ve collected Carston?”
The men from Tollerdown, of course.
He saw three men about thirty years old. One tall and black, with close-set eyes and a walk affected to hide his strength, called Clarence. One rougher, shorter, fairer, better bred, called Ross. Then a boy, Scylla’s brother Felix Taverner, the English peach in flower, lapis-eyes, the gold hair already thinning where the temples should have been thatched. Then, last, the tallest they called Picus, grave as a marsh-bird dancing and as liable to agitation, his colour drawn from the moon’s palette, steel gilt and pale, the skin warmed to gold by the weather, cooled to winter in the dark crystal eyes.
Clarence and Picus crowding off to
