The Young Desire It (23 page)

‘I was watching those scissors while you were over there with Jimmy,' he said, laughing so that she smiled at the rose between her hands. ‘The sun shone on them, and I said, if it does that once more it'll mean I may go out instead of staying here. And it did; only very slowly, as though it meant, Now, Charles, just this once you may.'

She wondered whether it were simply gladness at being home that made him chatter so. It was not like him, and she watched him closely. He was swinging from side to side on his heels, with his hands in the pockets of his woollen jacket. She saw that he had put on the heavy shoes he used for walking, and she said without looking up, ‘Why don't you walk instead of riding Danny? I think you're too big for him now, too; you'd better ride Julia except when we're using her. But why not walk?'

‘I think I'd meant to, all the time,' he said; and before she realized that he had gone the gate in the sweet-scented hedge thudded to behind him, and she could hear him going down the drive, the quick crush of gravel under his feet dying away as she listened; until at length the latch of the white gate rattled faintly, scarcely to be heard in the nearness of the bees.

Across the road young wheat shone richly in the sun. He broke some as he walked through; in his mouth the fat leaves gave up their sweet thick juice, and he crushed it out and swallowed it, until there was only a quid of rough fibre left. It was to taste the very soil and air whose essences the sun was transmuting into sweetness. He walked on quickly, down the bare centre furrow the drill had left; the sun shone, and the green field was still and brooding and alive.

It took him almost an hour to reach the Far Field. There too he saw now the young green in all things; even the undying grasses about the dead boles of trees were thickening, and in shadow the dew still lay on them coldly. He was dazzled by the sunlight from the turf. At the boundary fence, near where the mushrooms had come up, he saw that the next field, belonging to the new farm, was also under crop, though not so forwardly as the O'Neills' sowing. Too much lime, he thought; not much could be done with it; but farther east there was good soil, near the broad rich rises before the hills. He found that this limestone country was the dearer to him for its hard openness and the massy roll of it up and down, like an ocean swell. Even the spare outlines of the dead trees made the sky seem nearer and more deep; they stretched themselves like giants in their endless sleeping, black against its eternal blue.

Through all this conscious welcoming of it, he knew that his mind was awake towards only one beauty, and when he looked again towards the east, where the new farm was spread, invisible beyond the trees down in the flat hollow of a valley's issue, he expected to see the girl moving there; and the expectancy was in his very flesh, so that he trembled. But he did not see her; there was no one there, and the only movement was the faint upward shifting of blue smoke, hardly visible, so blue was the air there; the only sound a far crying of birds, and, a mile or more away nearer home, the remote echoes of men and dogs busy with sheep. From north to south his eyes searched the familiar eastward land, and then, when he knew that no one moved or stood there, he turned to the right and walked towards the grove itself.

The sun, his shadow said, stood at some time after ten. Under the trees marching up that slope the shade was very dark, and the coolness of night clung still about the rough trunks. He parted the pine branches and went in, brushing from his hands the scented dust of pollen that fell at his touch. So great was the depth of the shade after the brilliance of earth and sky under the sun, that for some moments he could not see more than the broken patches of green light on the farther side. A cold sweetness of pine needles slept on the air, and as his eyes were used to the change in the light he saw where the sun was making pools of dark gold in the dead leaves of the floor, though their downward falling was hidden, so that they seemed to lie there by chance.

Here was the earth where he had made her fire. The leaves were over it, but pieces of burnt stick came to light when he stirred the place with his foot. He looked about and listened, and at last called, ‘Is anyone here?' in a low, trembling voice which, breaking the long silence of his thought, sounded strange and unlikely, very loud. Only a bird answered him, by springing upwards out of the leaves with a short cry, almost a cry of pain, which, because the silence was wounded by his own voice, he felt his mind echo. There was no other movement, and no human answer.

If I sit down, he thought, I shall be able to see out there, and see the grass in the light. So he sat down where she had sat, bending his head to look beyond the roof of branch and leaf. There was the grass, motionless in the sun; and above the humped shoulder of a hill a piece of pale sky gave depth to his low view. He leaned back again.

Probably it was of no use to wait. On a day like this the dimness under the trees did not seem desirable; she would wish, rather, to walk about in the sun, or lie face downwards on a grassy slope and feel the warmth of the air weigh on her till she fell asleep. She would not come.

Quickly making himself assured of this, he walked round the grove restlessly, bending to pass under the branches stretched out to stop him. There was no one there. He knew there never would be again, now. His longing for her rose like a fever, increased by the certainty of that knowledge.

Perhaps, he thought calmly, she has not come down at all. How would I know? It would be possible; she may not have come.

It was possible that she had not come; it was possible, too, for him to learn yes or no; but he was unwilling to go across the fields to the new farm until he had asked his mother whether she knew the people there. He would find that out this day, and when she asked him why he wanted to know, he must tell her. He heard his own voice asking, and her question when she had answered him; he saw her face lit up softly by a lamp on the white table-cloth as she watched him and listened; but he could not think what she might say, for it seemed to him that there was nothing to be said. And after all, it would be at noon, when they took their meal on the veranda at the side of the house, in the air; there would be no lamp, but she was watching birds chase the bees out of the wattle-tree's great yellow pile, and listening to him; and of course there was nothing for her to say. He imagined the scene very clearly, and suddenly, surprisingly, was afraid of it.

Before he left that place, after waiting for half an hour in the certain knowledge that no one would come, he took a folded sheet of paper from his pocket, and wrote on it in pencil the name of the day, Friday, and the time, and finally a question:
Will you come to-morrow at eleven o'clock?
This paper he pinned to the bark of the tree, fixing it there with two splinters of wood. Then he went out into the sun, remembering that sudden fear of his mother; and because of it, and because too the place so held his imagination, he was in no haste to return home.

There would be visitors in the afternoon; his mother was playing with a bridge four, who visited one anothers' houses regularly. By the time he sat down, she had had her luncheon; for he had purposely been long in coming home, going through to the old farm to see Mrs. O'Neill and her small granddaughters on his way. These children had made him play with them; they had an endless game under the olives and lemon-trees growing round the old white house, and when he had left them, and walked along the river bank towards home, he felt happy.

He had his meal quickly, and went up to his room, so that he should not see strangers in the house; and there he remained, forcing himself to work out algebraical formulae and close, stale problems in trigonometry, forcing his eyes upon the paper until the afternoon waned and faded, and the sun set. Emily, who liked him but could not understand why he talked so little, brought in tea when she had served the others downstairs. He woke from the blind concentration of unfriendly study sufficiently to remind her of an old jest which had come to have some new humorous significance between them; and she went away thinking of him, thinking he was ‘a funny kid' but easy to get along with—not like some she'd known, she thought darkly, tossing her head in the plain pride of untroubled chastity.

The tea grew cold in the cup while he stared at the wall, struggling with the slight bewilderment of awakening. In time he returned to his work, driving himself at it stubbornly. When at last the light shrank and drained like a pool from his window against the sky, he got up and lit the lamp. In the room it was cold; as the flame drew up from blue to yellow it spread a fog over the glass, and he thought, watching it fade, that something had happened to him even in that day, and wondered what it was. Somehow his mother had become more real for him, and in a sense less reassuring. To laugh at love for the sake of peace was inconceivable, not only because of his youth, but because he had not sufficiently associated with his own kind; he had not learnt that sort of laughter yet, and was still arrogantly unknown to self-disgust. While he stared at the crystal clarity now of the lamp glass, and wondered at the change in him, wondering not objectively but in a personal bewilderment like pain's, he heard his mother call him from below, and knew that the house was once more still and at peace, with the strange voices gone from it. He turned down the lamp, judging the twist of his fingers from habit, without thought, and went out of the room.

Over their dinner table by the fire that evening he observed his mother's face closely for the first time in his life. It was hard for him to read there anything but the associations of his own mind; but he saw, or seemed to see, that she was, in a passionless and rather tired way, beautiful, and that her eyes on his face were expectant, as though she too were looking at him with the attention of some search. He thought, she knows I have changed. He wondered what she would think, and was sure of one thing: she would treat him with seriousness. For already the life of those two terms at the School had made him aware of the shattering force of laughter upon the mind's delicacy, and now he would have dreaded it, for to laugh at him would be to laugh against the girl; and from that his thought shrank.

‘Why are you looking like that, son?' she asked him, causing him to draw his vision back through its distance, and to realize that he was still staring at her calm, lamp-lit face.

‘I was wondering this morning who are the people at the new farm,' he said. ‘Do you know them?'

‘Yes,' she said, ‘I know them. Their name is McLeod; middle-aged people, only a man and wife; no children. Scottish people.'

The question which all day he had been expecting was not asked. A sense of incompleteness, of something yet to be said before he would be free, made him speak again, after a moment's pause to steady voice and mind. He told her, with difficulty, why he had asked.

‘Oh,' she said, when he had ended; and as though something had thrust them apart, they leaned back in their chairs under the impact of the silence, looking at one another, waiting for further words. When at last she spoke, the unfamiliar sadness of her voice, coming to him like that at the end of a strange, troubled day, made him once more consider her, now with a new compassion.

‘Does that make you feel happy?'

‘Yes,' he said slowly. ‘Oh, Mother—I don't know—yes, unless…'

‘Unless?' she said. ‘Tell me.'

‘Unless—I was going to say, unless it doesn't make you happy. And even then…I don't know if it's exactly happiness. I don't know. I don't know what it is, or what to think.'

‘A mother is happiest,' she said deliberately, ‘when her children are happy.' In the sudden emotion at her heart she saw how plainly she had lied; and she realized, with a force of shame and half-withered longing that because she found him like his father she desperately wanted to keep him from—her mind ventured on the words dully—from other women, and from love. It had been her belief that he would think of her before all, and now she knew her belief was mistaken, her heart betrayed by its own desires; she knew that her words had been a lie, spoken to ensnare his feelings. So she repeated them, looking at the fire beyond the white line of the table's edge. She said also, ‘You will have to learn life for yourself, son. You have to go through these things; every boy does. But try, do try—not for my sake but for yours—try not to let them seem too serious to you at the time.'

They looked at the fire. He was glad he had spoken, for he believed that now, as always, she would let him do what he thought best, without restraint.

‘Your father,' she said, ‘always went to extremes. If he was happy, or miserable, I always thought he was too much so. He let himself go completely, and it told on him in the end. It was bound to. I knew it. It made him drink to forget; and drink took him away from me—from us. Took him away from you; that's what I mind most, you not having a man to grow up by. But I think it's all right now; you don't need—you're old for your years, and manly enough. Only, you see, I don't want you to be like him—I don't want you to let yourself go like that—to extremes. You see, son, it does make people unhappy afterwards if they let themselves go. Too much.'

She had not looked away from the yellow merriment of the flames while she spoke, so that he could not see her speech in her eyes; but it seemed to him that her repeated words, ‘to extremes', had some meaning for herself particularly, deeper than he could reach; and he wondered uneasily for a while what she had intended him to understand; but the silence came warmly down on them, parting them again, and his thought, not fully set at rest by the way she had spoken and looked at him, clung about her words. She made him think of Penworth—each had seemed to argue with him, and again his defiance was touched.

But when they spoke at last, it was of other things, though all the time now he was striving to remember what the girl's face looked like; for to his surprise he had forgotten it, and retained only his own emotion at the thought of her, which now haunted him.