The Young Desire It (12 page)

Suddenly they were in country that he knew. He looked closely. That field, with the trees whose dark evening outlines were as familiar and lovely to him as faces, was five miles from home, outside his mother's lands. The station, then, was six miles farther on. In a quarter of an hour…

He hardly knew how to pass those minutes; his hands felt cold. Forrester began to talk again. He was going right through. Charles became nervously active.

‘I get down at the next station,' he said.

‘It's an awfully long journey,' Forrester grumbled. ‘Will I be able to get something to eat here?'

‘Refreshment rooms. What time do you get in?'

‘Not till ten o'clock.'

Charles was not listening. Far off across a field he could see a light where no light should be. That was what they called the new farm, where no one had lived for some years. Then he remembered. He recognized its place, and looked to the north. Yes, there were the lights of the big farm; above them set in thick blackness the sky was shell-pale; that lemon-coloured sea of light paled as he looked, and everything began to fade under his eyes.

All the time, looking out till his eyes ached in their sockets, he was building up the country they passed through. On either side of the line it was as familiar and as strange to him as the face of a lover; in the depth of dusk he visualized it as though he were at that moment walking in it and could smell the perfume of it. The low starry lights at the foot of the west had vanished; even as he peered out, the train swung round a bend towards the east, and ran into the gold lights of the station, its brakes grinding. Up in front a valve was opened, and the roar of escaping steam was being punctuated by the clanging of the bell in the refreshment rooms opposite his window. A guard passed along swinging a lantern in the patches of dusk between the lights, calling out the name of the station in cheerful tones that rose and fell above the bell, the slowing hiss of steam, and a final clamour of voices.

The morning after this momentous return, Charles was abroad at dawn. There was a dew—the first dew of early April, the first he had seen since the last spring blossomed passionately into summer. He went down to the river to bathe, alone with the birds that thronged the shadowless light before the coming of the sun. From the cool solitude of the farther bank he saw the tree-tops above him burn red and brighten into green in light that sank down from the middle sky, as the sun rose from the eastern hills. A perfect stillness held him; against the brown and green of the shadowed bank he shone whitely, perched on his log as motionless as a heron. Past his eastward-looking eyes a kingfisher flashed, as blue as noon; upstream it stopped, and suddenly was back, motionless on a low branch a few feet away. He thought he knew it, as he knew every scar and turn of its dead branch. It eyed him speculatively but with great alertness over its long beak, reminding him of Mr. Jolly. His merry laughter vanished the bird to reaches untroubled by such sounds.

He dropped back into the water and swam lazily across. It seemed to him that he must know every yellow stem and green blade of these grasses that overhung the lower platform and spread back from the edge in a close carpet of green which the eternal passing of the water kept fresh. He could see no current; to look down was to gaze into a green mirror that showed him his own pale face framed in the paler sky behind it; he had to force his eyes to peer through to the glimmering floor beneath, touched by the fairy shadows of little fish questing, their heads for ever upstream. The level of this water had sunk since he was last there; it was far down the legs of the higher platform where the spring-board of his own making swung out in space, reflected exactly, twelve feet beneath. Dryness had crusted the slime on the wood of the posts, and it was flaked and ready to crumble at a touch.

When he had put on his clothes he climbed the steps and hung the towel on a line to dry before going about the orchard and the gardens. Even at that hour the air was too still, and threatened him when he listened. Except where it lay in the long shadows, the dew had already gone; with the rising warmth a haze was forming in mid-heaven. He wandered, finding that nothing had been changed except his own regard, which was so keen now. There were still grapes hanging in shadow among the leaves of the vine-trellises, but a sweet, faint odour of must showed that the recent rain had already begun to make wine of them where they hung. On the slope of the orchard the earth was softening underfoot; against its red face the last leaves of peach and plum and apple lay yellow. The whole air was heavy with late ripeness and clung in his throat; bees, come out at the first light, took sugar from rotting fruit and the rare flowers. They grumbled and affected surprise among the grapes, where the small birds outdid them and feasted full, drowsing in the leaves, drunk with autumnal nectar, and opening suddenly their wide bright eyes, ready to feast again.

Charles was drunk like the birds, but with the realization that all this that seemed to him so beautiful was not, after all, part of a dream he had made to console loneliness. When he looked on the reality of all his years, it was that other life which seemed now like a dream making more vivid this light. He roamed about, whispering words to himself, whispering to his own ears things he could not have said aloud. On his knees upon the warm soil faintly steaming, he peered close, and saw the dagger-points of the first new green coming through—tiny pale surfaces, leaves almost invisible stretched to catch air and light, gasping joyously at the ultimate release from the buried seed. A week of dryness would wither them to death; but in this morning light, hazy with the evaporating dew, they drank in life like giants. Consciousness was coming back to the soil after the stunned pause of summer.

Half an hour after sunrise the sky was drifted over with a tissue of haze that deadened light and dulled the edges of the shadows. It grew hot very quickly, and the air stirred with unease. At breakfast, which they took on the low veranda, curtained in by a cascade of dark creeper shot with holes of light and patched with pale flowers, Charles asked about the mushrooms.

‘I don't know,' his mother said. ‘I meant to ask Mr. O'Neill about them. But I have an idea they don't care for them.'

Charles said he would walk out to the Far Field before lunch. This was at the farthest corner of his mother's own property, which O'Neill, an Irishman of good family with some means of his own, rented from her and worked with his numerous sons, whom he wished to bring up in the land-owning tradition to which, at home, he himself had always aspired. This farm property was set about foursquare to the compass; it extended seven miles or more from north to south, and in part six and in part ten from east to west, stopping a couple of miles short of the hills at its farthest eastern boundary. In the angle formed by the abrupt extension from a six-mile to a ten-mile boundary lay the most part of a small property which for years had not been worked. Mrs. Fox had suggested to O'Neill that they might share in the purchase of this outlying farm, and after a noisy council in conclave with ‘the boys' he agreed, seeing here no doubt the beginning of his full ownership of the whole property, if the years brought him luck. He was noisy, cheerful and superstitious, with a bad head for whisky but a good heart and enormous hands. It pleased him, who was by nature untidy, that the boundaries of the small new property were clean and made the whole estate compact by its inclusion. This had occurred in the previous year, and the joint owners, being unwilling to take over the working of it at that time, let it to some man whom Charles did not know. The lights he had seen from the train last night shone in the windows of this new farm, and calmly disagreed with his memory of its loneliness.

He walked out over ploughed ground where the plovers were already crying, with their lost sounds of lamentation. As he walked he noticed how clouds had come into the sky, slowly putting out the sun. The air quivered still with the trembling uncertainty heralding rain; a cold wind from the south rose and blew in gusts that searched him to the skin; but when he looked up towards the dazzling dullness overhead, he observed how the surface of cloud closing him in to earth was moving steadily south-east in a high cross-wind that would probably bring rain before night.

It was strange, he thought, how completely that bright dawn could be dispersed. He walked steadily on, over dried clover now, feeling melancholy with the day. The problem of self came on him again, fed and active upon his own melancholy, and he pondered on the surprise of his body's growth and potency. The brilliance of his own dawn had gone like the day's, clouded over by a high wind from the north-west and distressed by a questing breeze of doubt; but he, looking on himself from the too-close standing of immediate experience and with youth's impatient, humourless eye, did not see it so, for the unquestioning true-belief was gone with childhood's asceticism, and he had no simple perspective of faith and innocence now.

There was more emotion than thought in his consciousness as he walked across the pastures. He believed it was the day's sudden change that dulled his mind; he felt his flesh aching as though for rain; and rain would come.

In the Far Field, when he was there, his mood changed. The dead trees stood up stark against the windy sky; time and weather and the passage of fire had worn them down to solid masses undisturbed by branch or twig; that green grass that never seems to want life by dead trees, but thrives on the death it comforts, was thick round the buttresses of the scarred black trunks. Near the farthest fence he found what he was seeking; as he had imagined them, they broke through the softening crust of bare patches, shining like moons against the dark earth. A bold, unnatural excitement swelled in him as he gazed at the smooth white crowns breaking up through the moist virginity of the soil. He put down his basket, and made a wide cast, walking very quickly, to find any other beds that might be there. He was elated, but with something greater than the discovery. It was the trembling elation of secrecy, such as a lover knows when he explores his beloved's body in darkness and feels, in a blind joy, that he will explore the soul of life itself. But if he will, it is not for him then to know it, for his understanding's farthest boundaries are dictated by the assurance of the flesh.

Nor did Charles know, nor trouble to know, the source of his own surgence of emotion. He took in with his cast the soil where there would be patches, found two more and a linking scatter like a milky way tumbling across the grass, and returned to where his basket was. The sky, growing darker, locked him in, in that wild place where the greatest sound was the warlike beating of his heart in all space. He danced on the earth, drumming it with his feet; he fell down and lay spread out on the grass, on his face and on his back, laughing at the eternity of wind and sky. In the distance, above a grove of trees some way to the south, he could hear the birds; when he turned his head, there they were, flung into the sky, flung flat against the rising wind that turned leaves whitely. Their long cries, ‘
Ah! Ah!
' seemed to triumph, as though they had foretold the breaking of a hard summer.

‘Rain,' he said aloud. ‘They want rain, and so do I. I want it, I want it. Please, God, send some rain.'

He laughed at his own unthinking prayer, and believed he could feel an answer to it in the wind that was running along the grass, blowing over him where he lay. Peace and his isolation intoxicated him; there was no one else in the world, if the cries of the birds and the secret whisper of the wind in his ears were to be believed. The yes and no of life had mercifully been lifted from him for an hour under a darkening sky. The rise on whose bald eternal crown he lay offered him up like a living sacrifice.

In this ecstatic surrender of himself to all that was good in life, he remained for some minutes without moving, his head turned to one side as though some vision had been too great for him; and the wind played with his curling hair like a woman. That auburn fire that matched the greenish light of his eyes was clearly to be seen in it now, when he moved; in that dark gloom of the sun behind cloud his colour was pale, almost white, and the full, determined yet too sensitive line of nose and lip had their own promise of sorrows and difficulties to come, things of which no one reads in the expurgated textbook of a contented childhood.

In a while he left his contemplation of dreaming distances, and rose with some effort from the ground, as though he were leaving his strength like a garment there. A little way off, the mushrooms glimmered. He did not care so much now. It had been good to lie down and think of all the happy parts of life, such as the secret beauty and chance of dreams. But since they were there, waiting, he might as well gather them.

This he went about to do now, and was in the midst of it, bending to take them up with his knife in a renewed admiration of the deli-centripetal pink of their undersides, when the first heavy drops of rain were flung to earth round him. Instinctively he turned south and was in a moment running as hard as he was able towards the grove of trees which lay dark and solid some way off. That ground had no traps for his feet; he knew the cavities, concealed in the greenest grass, where trees had once been rooted, and the dry sandy course of a stream that rushed that way in winter and before the end of spring was gone again. He leapt from one low lip to the other, laughing aloud as he heard his mother's cool voice greeting him on his return: ‘There, son, I told you to take a coat. Now you'll be wet through, child…' and fading calmly away with the familiar words, ‘you should do as I tell you'.

Like a fallen curtain, low branches and brown trunks closed after him as he thrust through. They were there for shelter for cattle from summer sun and the boisterous westerly gales of winter, and the ground sloped down to the east, so that to one facing west a skyline cut across the silhouettes of trunks and branches high up. This was a dry and lonely place, with the whistle and sigh of the wind in the dark hill of pine needles all round, sounding like an old man falling into a doze, with a mute, restless air of half-sleep.