When he opened his eyes again, he started, seeing something creeping swiftly up a tree-trunk. It was a little bird. And a bird was whistling overhead. Tap-tap-tap—it was the small, quick bird rapping the tree-trunk with its beak, as if its head were a little round hammer. He watched it curiously. It shifted sharply, in its creeping fashion. Then, like a mouse, it slid down the bare trunk. Its swift creeping sent a flash of revulsion through him. He raised his head. It felt a great weight. Then, the little bird ran out of the shadow across a still patch of sunshine, its little head bobbing swiftly, its white legs twinkling brightly for a moment. How neat it was in its build, so compact, with pieces of white on its wings. There were several of them. They were so pretty—but they crept like swift, erratic mice, running here and there among the beech-mast.
He lay down again exhausted, and his consciousness lapsed. He had a horror of the little creeping birds. All his blood seemed to be darting and creeping in his head. And yet he could not move.
He came to with a further ache of exhaustion. There was the pain in his head, and the horrible sickness, and his inability to move. He had never been ill in his life. He did not know where he was or what he was. Probably he had got sunstroke. Or what else?—he had silenced the captain for ever—some time ago—oh, a long time ago. There had been blood on his face, and his eyes had turned upwards. It was all right, somehow. It was peace. But now he had got beyond himself. He had never been here before. Was it life, or not-life? He was by himself. They were in a big, bright place, those others, and he was outside. The town, all the country, a big bright place of light: and he was outside, here, in the darkened open beyond, where each thing existed alone. But they would all have to come out there sometime, those others. Little, and left behind him, they all were. There had been father and mother and sweetheart. What did they all matter. This was the open land.
He sat up. Something scuffled. It was a little brown squirrel running in lovely, undulating bounds over the floor, its red tail completing the undulation of its body—and then, as it sat up, furling and unfurling. He watched it, pleased. It ran on again, friskily, enjoying itself. It flew wildly at another squirrel, and they were chasing each other, and making little scolding, chattering noises. The soldier wanted to speak to them. But only a hoarse sound came out of his throat. The squirrels burst away—they flew up the trees. And then he saw the one peeping round at him, half way up a tree-trunk. A start of fear went through him, though, in so far as he was conscious, he was amused. It still stayed, its little keen face staring at him half way up the tree-trunk, its little ears pricked up, its clawey little hands clinging to the bark, its white breast reared. He started from it in panic.
Struggling to his feet, he lurched away. He went on walking, walking, looking for something—for a drink. His brain felt hot and inflamed for want of water. He stumbled on. Then he did not know anything. He went unconscious as he walked. Yet he stumbled on, his mouth open.
When, to his dumb wonder, he opened his eyes on the world again, he no longer tried to remember what it was. There was thick, golden light behind golden-green glitterings, and tall, grey-purple shafts, and darknesses further off, surrounding him, growing deeper. He was conscious of a sense of arrival. He was amid the reality, on the real, dark bottom. But there was the thirst burning in his brain. He felt lighter, not so heavy. He supposed it was newness. The air was muttering with thunder. He thought he was walking wonderfully swiftly and was coming straight to relief—or was it to water?
Suddenly he stood still with fear. There was a tremendous flare of gold, immense—just a few dark trunks like bars between him and it. All the young level wheat was burnished, gold glaring on its silky green. A woman, full-skirted, a black cloth on her head for head dress, was passing like a block of shadow through the glistering green corn, into the full glare. There was a farm, too, pale blue in shadow, and the timber black. And there was a church spire nearly fused away in the gold. The woman moved on, away from him. He had no language with which to speak to her. She was the bright, solid unreality. She would make a noise of words that would confuse him, and her eyes would look at him without seeing him. She was crossing there to the other side. He stood against a tree.
When at last he turned, looking down the long, bare groove whose flat bed was already filling dark, he saw the mountains in a wonder-light, not far away, and radiant. Behind the soft, grey ridge of the nearest range the further mountains stood golden and pale grey, the snow all radiant like pure, soft gold. So still, gleaming in the sky, fashioned pure out of the ore of the sky, they shone in their silence. He stood and looked at them, his face illuminated. And like the golden, lustrous gleaming of the snow he felt his own thirst bright in him. He stood and gazed, leaning against a tree. And then everything slid away into space.
During the night the lightning fluttered perpetually, making the whole sky white. He must have walked again. The world hung livid around him for moments, fields a level sheen of grey-green light, trees in dark bulk, and a range of clouds black across a white sky. Then the darkness fell like a shutter, and the night was whole. A faint flutter of a half-revealed world, that could not quite leap out of the darkness!—Then there again stood a sweep of pallor for the land, dark shapes looming, a range of clouds hanging overhead. The world was a ghostly shadow, thrown for a moment upon the pure darkness, which returned ever whole and complete.
And the mere delirium of sickness and fever went on inside him—his brain opening and shutting like the night—then sometimes convulsions of terror from something with great eyes that stared round a tree—then the long agony of the march, and the sun decomposing his blood—then the pang of hate for the captain, followed by a pang of tenderness and ease. But everything was distorted, born of an ache and resolving into an ache.
In the morning he came definitely awake. Then his brain flamed with the sole horror of thirstiness. The sun was on his face, the dew was steaming from his wet clothes. Like one possessed, he got up. There, straight in front of him, blue and cool and tender, the mountains ranged across the pale edge of the morning sky. He wanted them—he wanted them alone—he wanted to leave himself and be identified with them. They did not move, they were still and soft, with white, gentle markings of snow. He stood still, mad with suffering, his hands crisping and clutching. Then he was twisting in a paroxysm on the grass.
He lay still, in a kind of dream of anguish. His thirst seemed to have separated itself from him, and to stand apart, a single demand. Then the pain he felt was another single self. Then there was the clog of his body, another separate thing. He was divided among all kinds of separate beings. There was some strange, agonised connection between them, but they were drawing further apart. Then they would all split. The sun, drilling down on him, was drilling through the bond. Then they would all fall, fall through the everlasting lapse of space.
Then again his consciousness reasserted itself. He roused onto his elbow and stared at the gleaming mountains. There they ranked, all still and wonderful between earth and heaven. He stared till his eyes went black, and the mountains as they stood in their beauty, so clean and cool, seemed to have it, that which was lost in him.
4.
When the soldiers found him, three hours later, he was lying with his face over his arm, his black hair giving off heat under the sun. But he was still alive. Seeing the open, black mouth the young soldiers dropped him in horror.
He died in the hospital at night, without having seen again.
The doctors saw the bruises on his legs, behind, and were silent.
The bodies of the two men lay together, side by side, in the mortuary, the one white and slender, but laid rigidly at rest, the other looking as if every moment it must rouse into life again, so young and unused, from a slumber.
England, My England
I.
The dream was still stronger than the reality. In the dream he was at home on a hot summer afternoon, working on the edge of the common, across the little stream at the bottom
of the garden, carrying the garden path in continuation on to the common. He had cut the rough turf and the bracken, and left the grey, dryish soil bare. He was troubled because he could not get the path straight. He had set up his sticks, and taken the sights between the big pine-trees, but for some unknown reason everything was wrong. He looked again, strained and anxious, through the strong, shadowy pine-trees as through a doorway, at the green garden-path rising from the log bridge between sunlit flowers, tall purple and white columbines, to the butt-end of the old, beautiful cottage. Always, tense with anxiety, he saw the rising flowery garden and the sloping old roof of the cottage, beyond the intervening shadow, as in a mirage.
There was the sound of children’s voices calling and talking: high, childish, girlish voices, plaintive, slightly didactic, and tinged with hard authoritativeness. “If you don’t come soon, Nurse, I shall run out there where there are snakes.”
Always this conflict of authority, echoed even in the children! His heart was hard with disillusion. He worked on in the gnawing irritation and resistance.
Set in resistance, he was all the time clinched upon himself. The sunlight blazed down upon the earth; there was a vividness of flamy vegetation and flowers, of tense seclusion amid the peace of the commons. The green garden-path went up between tall, graceful flowers of purple and white; the cottage with its great sloping roofs slept in the for-ever sunny hollow, hidden, eternal. And here he lived, in this ancient, changeless, eternal hollow of flowers and sunshine and the sloping-roofed house. It was balanced like a nest in a tree, this hollow home, always full of peace, always under heaven only. It had no context, no relation with the world; it held its cup under heaven alone, and was filled for ever with peace and sunshine and loveliness.
The shaggy, ancient heath that rose on either side, the downs that were pale against the sky in the distance, these were the extreme rims of the cup. It was held up only to heaven; the world entered in not at all.
And yet the world entered in and goaded the heart. His wife, whom he loved, who loved him—she goaded the heart of him. She was young and beautiful and strong with life like a flame in the sunshine; she moved with a slow grace of energy like a blossoming, red-flowered tree in motion. She, too, loved their hollow with all her heart. And yet she was like a weapon against him, fierce with talons of iron, to push him out of the nest-place he had made. Her soul was hard as iron against him, thrusting him away, always away. And his heart was hard as iron against her in resistance.
They never put down their weapons for a day now. For a few hours, perhaps, they ceased to be in opposition; they let the love come forth that was in them. Then the love blazed and filled the old, silent hollow where the cottage stood, with flowers and magnificence of the whole universe.
But the love passed in a few hours; only the cottage with its beauty remained like a mirage. He would abide by the mirage. The reality was the tension of the silent fight between him and his wife. He and she, as if fated, they were armed and exerting all their force to destroy each other.
There was no apparent reason for it. He was a tall, thin, fair, self-contained man of the middle class, who, never very definite or positive in his action, had now set in rigid silence of negation. He kept rigid within himself, never altering nor yielding, however much torture of repression he suffered.
Her ostensible grievance against him was that he made no money to keep his family; that, because he had an income of a hundred and fifty a year, he made no effort to do anything at all—he merely lived from day to day. Not that she accused him of being lazy; it was not that; he was always at work in the garden; he had made the place beautiful. But was this all it amounted to? They had three children; she had said to him, savagely, she would have no more. Already her father was paying for the children’s nurse, and helping the family at every turn. What would they do without her father? Could they manage on a hundred and fifty a year, with a family of three children, when they had both been brought up in plenty, and could not consider pennies? Living simply as they did, they spent two hundred and fifty a year; and now the children were tiny; what would it be when they had to go to school? Yet Evelyn would not stir to obtain any more.
Winifred, beautiful and obstinate, had all her passion driven into her conscience. Her father was of an impoverished Quaker family. He had come down from Newcastle to London when he was a young man, and there, after a hard struggle, had built up a moderate fortune again. He had ceased to be a Quaker, but the spirit persisted in him. A strong, sensual nature in himself, he had lived according to the ideas of duty inculcated upon him, though his active life had been inspired by a very worship of poetry and of poetic literature. He was a business man by tradition, but by nature he was sensual, and he was on his knees before a piece of poetry that really gratified him. Consequently, whilst he was establishing a prosperous business, a printing house and a small publishing house, at home he diffused the old Quaker righteousness with a new, æsthetic sensuousness, and his children were brought up in this sensuous heat, which was always, at the same time, kept in the iron grate of conventional ethics.
Winifred had loved her husband passionately. He came of an old south-of-England family, refined and tending towards dilettantism. He had a curious beauty of old breeding, slender and concentrated, coupled with a strange inertia, a calm, almost stoic indifference which her strong, crude, passionate, ethical nature could not understand. She could not bear it that their marriage, after all the tremendous physical passion that had convulsed them both, should resolve gradually into this nullity. Her passion gradually hardened into ethical desire. She wanted some result, some production, some new vigorous output into the world of man, not only the hot physical welter, and children.
Gradually she began to get dissatisfied with her husband. What did he stand for? She had started with a strange reverence for him. But gradually she fell away. A sense of meaninglessness came up strong in her. He was so strangely inconclusive. Her robust, undeveloped ethical nature was negated by him.
Then came the tragedy. They had three children, three fair-haired flitting creatures, all girls. The youngest was still a baby. The eldest, their love-child, was the favourite. They had wanted a boy in place of the others.
Then one day this eldest child fell on a sharp old iron in the garden and cut her knee. Because they were so remote in the country she did not have the very best attention. Blood-poisoning set in. She was driven in a motor-car to London, and she lay, in dreadful suffering, in the hospital, at the edge of death. They thought she must die. And yet in the end she pulled through.
In this dreadful time, when Winifred thought that if only they had had a better doctor at the first all this might have been averted, when she was suffering an agony every day, her husband only seemed to get more distant and more absent and exempt. He stood always in the background, like an exempt, untouched presence. It nearly drove her mad. She had to go to her father for all advice and for all comfort. Her father brought the specialist to the child; her father came to Winifred and held his arm round her, and called her his darling, his child, holding her safe, whilst all the time her husband stood aloof, silent, neutral. For this horrible neutrality, because of the horrible paralysis that seemed to come over him in these crises, when he could do nothing, she hated him. Her soul shrank from him in a revulsion. He seemed to introduce the element of horror, to make the whole thing cold and unnatural and frightful. She could not forgive him that he made the suffering so cold and rare. He seemed to her almost like a pale creature of negation, detached and cold and reserved, with his abstracted face and mouth that seemed shut in eternity.
The child recovered, but was lame. Her leg was stiff and atrophied. It was an agony to both the parents, they who lived wholly by the physical life. But to the mother it was an open, active grief; to him it was silent and incommutable, nihilistic. He would not speak of the child if he could help it, and then only in an off-hand, negligent fashion. So the distance was finally unsheathed between the parents
, and it never really went away. They were separate, hostile. She hated his passivity as if it were something evil.
She taunted him that her father was having to pay the heavy bills for the child, whilst he, Evelyn, was idle, earning nothing. She asked him, did he not intend to keep his own children; did he intend her father to support them all their lives? She told him, her six brothers and sisters were not very pleased to see all the patrimony going on her children.
He asked her what could he do? She had talked all this out with her father, who could easily find a suitable post for Evelyn; Evelyn ought to work, everybody said. He was not idle; why, then, would he not do some regular work? Winifred spoke of another offer—would he accept that? He would not. But why? Because he did not think it was suitable, and he did not want it. Then Winifred was very angry. They were living in London, at double expense; the child was being massaged by an expensive doctor; her father was plainly dissatisfied; and still Evelyn would not accept the offers that were made him. He just negated everything, and went down to the cottage.
Selected Stories Page 20