The Young Desire It (38 page)

At last she opened her eyes and looked into his, smiling, capturing all his thought.

‘That was wonderful. I was awake, but I seemed to dream you were there.'

‘I was looking at you,' he said.

‘I know. I wanted you to.'

She moved her arm, and her hand lay limply on his knees. He felt its warmth burn through against the skin.

‘Isn't it lovely,' she said. ‘And oh—Charles! it does seem as if it will last.'

‘Yes.'

‘It does. I don't think about it. Do you know how I've been longing for this—to be with you in this place? Such a long time. It's summer now. Only a few months—a year ago I didn't know. Now I know.'

Her hand moved and came to life. He felt it so sharply, with his whole consciousness, that the small quiet stir of fingers and wrist was almost unbearable.

‘I know,' he said. ‘And usually I don't like summer; yet now it somehow fascinates me.'

‘It makes you hot all through? Does it? Warm all the time, from inside?'

She raised herself slowly on her elbow, leaning towards him.

‘That's what it does to me now,' she said, hesitating in a sudden eagerness. ‘Now. I can't remember before. All sorts of new things I notice when I'm with you.'

Her voice was warm, as though she were waking from sleep. His knees remembered where her hand had been.

‘Charles. Just for these few days…'

Her smile implored him, and answered for him when he could not speak. He continued to look at her steadfastly, feeling that he had never clearly seen her before this hour; and it seemed to him that indeed he had not, though what he saw as a change in her was, unknown to him, an awakening of a part of his consciousness hitherto restlessly asleep. He perceived her to be, in the glow of her physical being, desirable.

‘Not for these few days,' he said in a low voice. ‘Time—time is—it's all different now, Margaret. I know what I didn't know before.'

She took his face between her hands, leaning so near that he became lost in the wide, dark dilation of her pupils, unnaturally large and containing small reflections of himself held by her hands.

‘Do you know too?' she murmured. ‘How can I know you do? How can I be sure you know, Charles? Oh, Charles.'

‘I think,' he said, ‘I'm just beginning to see you as—as I should have done before. Now it's too late.'

‘No, no,' she cried passionately. ‘It's not. It's not.' But when he asked her what that meant she turned her face away without answering, as though she had said too much, and wished him to forget her words.

‘It must be,' he said, suddenly made miserable by his awareness of a situation he could not fully understand. It seemed that something was moving with inexorable leisure to a close before he had realized its event; and, as if a nightmare landslide were upon them, he wanted to take her, alive and willing, into the stricture of his two arms, not for her protection but for his own futile comfort at a time when protection was not possible. The knowledge of that futility, suggested by his perception of some irrevocable conclusion, made him stay still, looking at her averted head with a sense of loss already accomplished, and of the poverty of all speech and movement.

‘There's a way,' she said at last, in a dry strangled voice. Her throat and all he could see of her face were slowly flushed; but she did not move nor look towards him with the deliberate effort of defiance he might have expected after her words. With his eyes on the trickle of sand between his fingers, he thought he heard her say something more.

‘What did you say then?'

‘I said…oh, what's the use! It's terrible to go on talking like this.'

‘I can't help it,' he said helplessly.

‘It all takes so long. And it's not
us—
is it? We're not really like this.'

She turned to him again with that same eagerness.

‘We're not, are we? Charles? We're together all the time. Talking is just horrible.'

‘Well,' he said, ‘stand up and see how you feel. We could go down.'

He stood up, and, taking her hands, felt her weight in his own as she rose. There they remained facing one another, until, without seeming to have moved, she was near and he felt her breasts soft and strange against him. Their eyes were almost level.

‘What are you going to do?' she said. ‘Will you go and bathe? I can feel you're still hot, and your shirt's wet.'

‘Will you go in?'

She laughed breathlessly. ‘We have nothing to wear. Suppose…'

‘No one will come,' he said quietly. This was easy—more easy and right than he could have imagined. He could not know that the ecstasy of that August afternoon had constricted his mind more than anything following, more than any other encounter, and that now, in physical contact with her, there was a promise not of repetition but of some solution and easing of the constriction. All he knew, as wave after wave of unknown rhythms mounted in him, was that this, this touching and perceiving the firm reality of her flesh, which no garment could conceal, was what for so long he had desired. It was this he had feared to lose, and had thought, even a few minutes past, to have lost already. The other, the discovery of her in his most inward being, would never be lost.

But he could think now of no future, for the urgency of the present forced his vision to see only her and the transparent water laving their two bodies with its flow.

‘Let's bathe,' he said with finality. ‘Then we shall be cool, and have appetites for food. Come, I'll show you.'

They went down along the low firm bank of the stream. Grasses spilled over into the water, combing free a pattern of ripples that faded and were for ever renewed. The water-smell lay on the air they breathed. On their left the trees grew more widely, and great bold patches of sun threw shadows as they passed, and were gone. After a hundred yards or so they were in deep shade again; the sun was high overhead; day neared its climax, and the air burned, shrill and dry, glittering over the yellow silver of the grass-land. Under the trees the brilliant cruelty of noon was unreal to them. At last he stopped and showed her.

‘There. You stay here; you can't be seen—see, you're shut in a room. Go quickly into the water and wait for me. I'll go over the other side. Float down. That's what I always do.'

She watched him take off his shoes, roll up the bottoms of his trousers and cross, most of the way on a tree-trunk lying diagonally out from the bank there, half-sunk, with the water rolling silently over it. When he was gone, and the low echo of his voice saying ‘All right now' had left the air more still, more expectant than before, she took her clothes off as though in a dream, dropping them on the sand by her, calmly, quickly, apparently without thought.

When she was naked, she looked down with an expression of surprise waking in her face, and a warmth of colour rose from her breasts to her forehead, a colour of perfect shame. She ran the palms of both hands slowly over her body almost to her knees, carefully, as if to assure herself of its shape and reality. The heavy silken plaits of hair lay against the powder-smooth skin when she rose from stooping. She began to look about her, clasping her hands together with an unconscious expression of anguish. Something, some change of thought, perhaps some remembered knowledge of herself, seemed to have made her hesitate. After appearing for some moments to be in a grave uncertainty, she bent down and took up her garments, which she held in her hands, looking at them with that wakening surprise in her face once more. Then she began to put them on.

When Charles came down with the voluptuous current he did not see her, until her voice, quite close to him, said softly, ‘How white you are! As white as—me.'

She was on the shelving bank a few yards away, staring at him steadily with a look of faint surprise. He could not understand why she had not come in.

‘I couldn't,' she said. ‘It wasn't that I didn't want to. I couldn't.'

She stepped into the water and came out near him where he crouched forward, sitting on the harsh sand of the floor. The water rose to her knees; she drew her skirt away from it and leaned forward to touch his shoulder and back with her hand. It made him shiver. He watched the slowing current curl away from her knees in a thin, shadowy wake. She took her hand away and put it to her lips. She was smiling.

‘I could splash you,' he said. ‘I could pull you in.' He caught her hand as she let it fall by her side. ‘You make me wish I hadn't come in, now. It's not so nice alone.'

‘Well, I'm here,' she said, and she put her hand to his own lips, and pressed it there. He breathed the perfume of the skin, as once before he had done, closing his eyes so that he might see all. His wet fingers clung to her wrist. Her expression of surprise softened and became a look of unutterable compassion, but this he did not see. She gently withdrew her hand from his.

‘I must go out,' she said.

He opened his eyes.

‘All right. I shall too. Go up and wait for me.'

She was gone. The ripple and splash of water as she moved away across the current grew faint. He was glad she was gone, now; but a greater intimacy, full of confidence, had come to them in those few minutes. Even if he relaxed and was content to be alone, he was content, too, that they had been there together like that; it gave his thoughts the comfort of accomplished security. He must have been shaken by a wish to touch her, to see her wholly, for his hands felt empty, and he gripped them and wrung them under the water, and looked at them, conscious of much of their purpose, and suspecting their part in the expression and confirmation of love.

On the farther bank he dried his hands in the grass, rubbing the slippery dead blades between flat palms. The scorching air did the rest. Within a few minutes he was clad again, and there was a sort of relief in the touch of the warm garments on his cool skin. He went to cross the stream again, with the knapsack on his shoulder and his shoes in one hand.

Through the low leaves showed the red splash of her skirt, a living colour like new blood. He went across. Sitting on the sand, with her back curved and her knees drawn up, she was fastening the sandal strap across one instep. He remembered the same pose in the kitchen—how long ago was that? Surprised by the length and whiteness of her leg at the back above the knee, he looked away, as he meant his mind to turn away at present from too searching a thought of her. Self-consciousness was new to him, and he was ashamed.

The water and his innocent nakedness had made a stranger of him, and when she stood up, throwing back her head to shake her hair away, they looked at one another searchingly. He was in such a dream that he stood without speaking, wondering not if this were so but if there were any truth in any of his memories of that previous life, that stood like shadows at the edge of his consciousness of her. She looked at him as steadfastly, her hands hanging open by her sides, her lips apart. A sort of exhaustion grew heavy upon them, as though they might fall down. At length, dragging himself free, he spoke.

‘Shall we go down and have something to eat—now?'

They were both hungry, and that seemed surprising enough to be laughable. Side by side they followed the stream round; under the trees by the pool, white sand curved to a low mass of rock, and the shade was intense like the sunlight outside. A reflection from the open water in the middle was not able to reach in to them.

‘I'd never have thought it could be so cool,' she murmured, stretched out face-downwards in the sand, her cheek on her hands, watching him; and he told her that this was the coolest place in the world, in summer, but very melancholy in winter, and very dark. He showed her the smooth bed of sand on which they rested.

‘This is all under water. That's why it's so smooth and even. No marks are left.'

With a twig he wrote her name in the white surface.

‘Leave it there,' he said soberly; and because his thought was evident to both of them, like an intrusion of the world they were forgetting, neither spoke, and they took their food in silence. He did not taste what he was swallowing, after that.

Later she went to the edge of the pool for water. When they had drunk of it, and poured some out in instinctive libation to the lonely spirit of that place, they moved near to one another on a common impulse, and lay close together. Her head was in the hollow of his arm, against his side; he could touch her breasts and her cheek. They remained silent, looking up at the roof of leaves, beyond which the hot metallic sky shone unseen. The stream was splashing and sleeping among its rocks at the lower edge, but now they could not feel any relaxation of sleep in their bodies or their eyes. Out there the day poised triumphant, at its height and fullest power, careless of this final conquest it made within them; the singing insects were mad with light, and the air stretched to a perilous tension, ready to split and shatter, ready with the whole world to burst into flame.

‘Charles,' she said.

She raised herself upon one elbow, so that her face was above his own. She was the day. Her dry, soft fingers touched his lips, his cheek, his forehead, and strayed again into his hair, dully caressive. She was looking down, bending over him, but not seeing him; he trembled to know the heavy relaxation of her lips, swollen and parted with the blind concentration of love. A measureless knowledge in her gaze made him close his eyes; he wanted to cry out, but her hand was over his mouth, holding him silent.

In time he put up his arms, to undo the green ribbons that swung at the ends of her heavy fair plaits; and at last, like a silken fall of cloth, her hair spread free, shutting in their two faces. They could not smile now, nor speak, not even to say each other's name that was loudly in the mind of each. The day had too sure a power over them; though they might evade it in cool shadow, they were a part of its triumph, and it forced them together, encouraging them with the illusion that what they did they did by the blind volition of their own single will. In its cruel majesty it echoed mockingly her one cry, that was a cry of relief from a long tyranny.