Thunder on the Left (1925)/Chapter 14
IF THERE were only one moonshiny night in each century, men would never be done talking of it. Old lying books would be consulted; in padded club chairs grizzled gentry whose grandfathers had witnessed it would prate of that milky pervasion that once diluted the unmixed absolute of night. And those who had no vested gossip in the matter would proclaim it unlikely to recur, or impossible to have happened.
Mr. and Mrs. Brook and Martin had gone on toward the veranda. Joyce lingered where the edge of the house's shadow was a black frontier on the grass. The lawn was a lake of pallor. Under the aquamarine sky, glazed like the curly inmost of a shell, earth was not white or glittering, but a soft wash of argentine grey. There was light enough to see how invisible the world truly is. The pure unpurposeful glamour poured like dissolving spirit on the dull fogged obscure of ordinary evening: the cheap veneers of shadow peeled away, true darkness was perceivable: the dark that threads like marrow in the bones of things: the dark in which light is only an accidental tremble. Where trees and shrubs glowed in foamy tissue, hung chinks and tinctures of appeasing nothing. This was abyss unqualified, darkness neat.
She was drowned at the bottom of this ocean of transparency. She felt as people look under water, pressed out of shape, refracted, blurred by the pressure of an enormous depth of love. In such clean light a thought, a memory, a desire, could put on shape and living, stare down the cautious masks of habit. The trustiest senses could play traitor inside this bubble of pearly lustre; the hottest bonfires of mirth would be only a flicker in this dim stainless peace. Better to go indoors, join the polite vaudeville of evasion, escape the unbearable reality of this enchanted . . .
"Here you are!" said a voice. "Thank goodness. I want to ask you things. You're different."
It was Martin.
"What's the matter with all these people?" he exclaimed. "Why can't they have fun? Why do they keep on telling me they love me? I don't want to be loved. You can't be happy when you're being loved all the time. It's a nuisance. I want to build castles in the sand and play croquet and draw pictures. I want to go to bed and get a good sleep for the Picnic; and that lady wants me to kiss her. I did it once; isn't that enough?"
Here was a merriment: to expect her, at this particular junction of here and now, to join his deprecations.
"Quite enough," she said. "But it depends on the person. She may not think so."
"It's Mrs. Phyllis. I asked her if she was ready for me to go to bed, and she said I mustn't say such things. What's the matter with her? I think she's angry. Everybody seems angry. Why is it?"
Her pulses were applauding her private thought: If Phyllis loves him, I can love George.
"And I saw Bunny in the garden. She says you're the only one who can help me because you almost understand."
"Bunny! Bunny who? What do you mean? . . ."
He must be mad. Yet it seemed an intelligible kind of madness: some unrecognized but urgent meaning sang inside it like a sweet old tune. In the misty moonlight she saw the great wheel of Time spinning so fast that its dazzling spokes seemed to shift and rotate backward. But her mind still intoned its own jubilee: If Phyllis loves him, I can love George. It's all right for me to love George. Be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors!
"Bunny Richmond, of course. She's playing some kind of hide-and-seek round here. It's not fair."
"It is fair!" cried Bunny passionately. He could hear her calling to him from somewhere just round the corner of the path. "Oh, Martin, Martin, can't you see? I can't tell you, you've got to find out for yourself."
Bunny had cried out so eagerly that even Joyce almost heard her. She turned to look.
"What was that, someone whispering?"
"It's only Bunny," he said impatiently. "She's playing tricks on me. She wants me to go away."
Joyce had stepped out of the shadow, and now Martin partly saw.
"Why, I know who you are. Why . . . why, of course. They called you Miss Clyde, that fooled me. You're not Miss Anybody, you're Joyce . . . the one who gave me the mouse. You don't love me too, do you? People only love you when they want you to do things."
Bunny kept calling him, but he closed his ears to her.
"No, I don't love you," she said slowly. "I love George."
But she had to look at him again to be sure. He was very beautiful and perplexed. Perhaps she loved everybody. For an instant she thought he was George; she could see now that there was a faint resemblance between them. Then she noticed that George was there too. He had come along the path from the stable. His face was sharpened with resolve. He paid no attention to Martin, but spoke directly to her.
"Here's your scarf," he said, almost roughly, holding it out. Then he remembered it was not hers, and thrust it in his pocket. He made an uncertain step toward her.
"Oh, we can't go on like this," he said harshly. "This has got to . . ." He made a queer awkward gesture with his arms. She went to them.
"How funny you are," observed Martin from the shadow. "First you want to push her away and then you hug her."
Apparently George did not hear him.
"Why did you wake me?" he was asking her. "Why couldn't I go on sleepwalking through life? If I had never known you, how much anguish I'd have missed. Oh, my poor dear."
"You mustn't talk to her like that," said Martin. "This is Joyce, she thinks once is enough. She isn't like Phyllis."
"Go away, Martin," called Bunny. "It's no use now."
George held her fiercely. His voice trembled on broken words of tenderness. His bewildered mind craved the ease of words, a little peace, a little resting time. Must this glory of desire be carried for ever secret in his heart?
"You'll hurt her," said Martin angrily.
This they had stumbled on, George's heart cried to him. It was none of their seeking. She belongs to who can understand her, insisted the sweet sophistries of blood. Joyce leaned up to him, the dear backward curve of woman yearning to the face of her dream.
"Don't you know me?" Martin appealed to her. "You gave me the mouse yesterday."
He was unheeded. They did not even know he was there.
"You're doing it too," he said to her bitterly, and went away.
"George, when did I give you a mouse?"
"A mouse? What are you talking about? You're going to give me something much better than a mouse. Do you know what I said to you once in a dream? I said, the worst of my love for you is that it's so carnal."
Her eyes met his, troubled but steady.
"And do you know what you answered?"
"No," she said pitifully. "Oh, George, George, I don't know about these things."
"You said, 'Perhaps that's what I like about it.'"
She clung to him in a kind of terror.
"I don't know whether I said that. George . . . don't let's be like other people. Does it matter?"
They stood together and the crickets shouted, rattled tiny feet of approval on the floor of the dunes like a gallery of young Shelleys. The whole night was one immense rhythm; up the gully from the beach came a slow vibration of surf. She was weak with the question in her blood, her knees felt empty. Perhaps that's where your morality is kept, in the knees, she thought. She slipped her arms under his coat, round the hard strong case of his ribs, to keep from tottering. The tobacco smell of his lapel was infinitely precious and pathetic.
"How do I know what matters?" he whispered. "We can wait and see. If it's important, the time will come. But I want you to know, my love for you is complete. It wants everything. Can't you hear the whole world singing it? Everything, everything, everything."
"I don't like the crickets. They're trying to get us into trouble."
Everything is so queer this evening, she thought. How did all this happen? I'm frightened.
"We've always been different from other people," she said. "We're absurd and pitiful and impossible. Don't let's spoil it, let's just be us."
His arms held her more gently. For love is beyond mere desire: it is utter tenderness and pity. Sing, world, sing: here are your children caught in the chorus of that old, old music; here are Food and Hunger that meet only to cancel and expire. Here, cries Nature in her deepest diapason, here are my bread and wine. Too great to be accused of blasphemy, she shames not to borrow the words of man's noblest fancy. Take, eat, she cries to the famished. This is my body which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me. And her children, conscious of lowly birth, can rise to denials her old easy breast never dreamed.
"George," said Joyce quickly, "is any one watching . . . listening to us? I've had the strangest feeling. As though someone was trying to tell me something, calling me."
"A singing in your nose, perhaps."
"No, but really."
"I've been trying to tell you something."
"Where did Mr. Martin go? Wasn't he there?"
"I didn't see him."
They turned toward the house. Its dark shadow hung over them, clear, impalpable, black as charcoal. They felt purified by mutual confession and charity.
"I think it was the house listening to us," she said. "Why am I so happy?"
He knew that he loved her. It was not lust, for though he desired her and a thousand times had had her in his heart, yet he shrank from possession, fearing it might satiate this passion that was so dear. So it was a fool's love: perhaps a coward's, since to be taken is every woman's need. But who shall say? Life is a foreign language: all men mispronounce it.
He loved her, for he saw the spirit of life in her. He loved her as a dream, as something he himself had created, as someone who had helped to create part of him. He loved her because it was secret, hopeless, impossible. He had loved her because he could not have her: and now she was here for his arms. The Dipper and the wind in the pine trees said, Poor fool, if you want her, take her. The black flap in the sky, where the starry pinning has fallen out (it opens into the law of gravity) said, It concerns only yourselves, no one will know. The tide and the whistling sand dunes said, She's yours already.
From the sleeping porch over their heads he heard one of the children cough.
"George," she whispered, "I'll do whatever you tell me."
He turned to her. "I'd like to see any one laugh at locksmiths."