The suddenness, thought Judith – the sureness, the excitement! … glorious, glorious creature of warmth and colour! Her blue eyes had a wild brilliance between their thick lashes: they flew and paused, stared, flew again …
‘Isn’t it awful,’ said Jennifer, ‘to have enlightened parents? They never ask you whether you care to be enlightened too, but offer you up from the age of ten onwards as a living sacrifice to examiners. And then they expect you to be grateful. Hmm!’ She glowered at the photographs of a pleasant-looking couple on the mantelpiece. ‘God! I’m tired. Give me a hand out of this trunk, and I’ll get to bed.’
She struggled up, supped off her dressing gown and stood revealed in striped silk pyjamas.
‘Too late for my exercises tonight,’ she said. ‘Are you keen on muscle? It’s more womanly not to be. I’ve over-developed mine. I can lend you a book called “How to Keep Fit” with pictures of young men in loin-cloths. You look wiry. Can you run?’
‘Yes – and climb –’ said Judith excitedly.
‘Oh! … I can’t imagine you doing anything except wander about looking innocent and bewildered. We might have some tests tomorrow!’
She went to the window, opened it wide and leaned out. Judith came and stood beside her. The night was still, dark and starry.
‘The grounds are beautiful,’ murmured Judith.
‘Yes – great trees –’ she murmured softly back. ‘And nightingales, I believe, in spring.’
‘Nightingales …’
‘Oh, there’s lots of things to look forward to,’ said Jennifer, turning round and smiling full at Judith. Their eyes sparkled and flashed: sympathy flowed like an electric current between them. She went on:
‘Oh Lord! Look at my bedroom. I’ll just clear a space and sleep among the wreckage. Won’t my gyp be pleased? It’s best to begin as I shall certainly go on, so I’ll leave it to her. She’ll like it as soon as I’ve won her heart … Good night, Judith. I must tell you most people call me Jane.’
‘I shall call you Jennifer. It’s delicious, – different from anyone else. It’s like you.’
From the pillow Jennifer’s face broke into shy smiles, like a gratified child’s.
Judith busied herself quietly in the sitting-room, tidying the cups and knives – enjoying the novel sensation of rendering service. After a few moments she called:
‘You wouldn’t suppose from their conversation that these girls are intellectual – would you?’
There was no reply. After a few more minutes she peeped into the bedroom. Jennifer’s peaceful flushed countenance and regular breathing greeted her astonished senses.
She was sleeping the sleep of the slightly intoxicated just.
2
The Indian summer stretched out through October that year. The closing harmonies were so complete that the gardens of the earth seemed but to repeat and enrich the gardens of the sky; and a day like a sunflower broadened to a sunset full of dahlias and late roses; with clouds above them massed, burnished and edged with bloom like the foliage of the trees of earth. Slowly at night the chill mists, bitter-sweet in smell, luminous beneath the moon, crept over and blotted all out.
The weeks drifted on. College became a pleasant habit. Lecturers ceased to be oracles. Work ceased to be important. Young men stared in lecture rooms and streets. There grew the consciousness of fundamental masculine apartness: of the other sex mysteriously calling to and avoiding it across an impassable gulf. Bookshops became places in which to wander and browse whole mornings. Towards the town, back from the town, the long road stretched out daily between the flat ploughed fields: the immense and crushing arc of the sky was swept forever with rich changes.
And the buildings, – the fall of sunlight and shadow on grey stone, red stone, the unblurred design of roofs and walls at dusk, – the buildings lifted their bulk, unfolded their pattern, glowed upon the mind by day and by night, breaking in upon essays, disturbing time-papers.
Jennifer’s shining head, curved cheek, lifted white throat lay against the blue curtain, just beyond the lamplight. Very late she sat there and said nothing, did nothing; made you lift eyes from the page, watch her, dream, wait for her smile to answer yours.
The garden, the river, the children next door were far away. Sometimes when you listened, there was nothing to be heard, not even Roddy; sometimes the bird-calls, the wet green scatters of buds, the flowering cherry tree; sometimes the sunny mown lawn in stripes, the red rambler clouds heavy on the hot wall; sometimes the mists, the bloom on the clouds, the fallen yellow leaves in the dew; sometimes the rooks rocking in the blown treetops, the strong dark bewildering pattern of bare branches swirling across the sky, the tragic light crying out for a moment at sunset, haggard through torn clouds, then drowned again: sometimes these moved in their seasons through the garden so faintly behind your shut eyes they stirred no pang. Sometimes the silent group waiting in the darkness by the river had vanished as if they had been childish things put away.
Time flowed imperceptibly, casting up trifles here and there upon its banks.
3
King’s Chapel at Evensong. The coloured windows faded gradually out: only a twilight blue was left beneath the roof: and that died too. Then, only the double rows of candle-flames gave light, pointing and floating above the immemorial shadows of the floor and the shadows of benches and the shadowed faces of the old men and youths. Hushed prayer echoed; and the long rolling organ-waves rose and fell half-drowning the singing and setting it free again. All was muffled, flickering, submerged deep under cloudy water. Jennifer sat there motionless, wistful-eyed and unconscious, neither kneeling nor standing with others, but leaning rigidly back with eyes fixed and brilliant.
And afterwards came the emerging into a strange town swallowed up in mist. White surprising faces glimmered and vanished under the lamps. The buildings loomed formlessly in the dense sky, picked out by dimly-lit windows, and forlorn lanterns in the gateways. The life of Cambridge was thickly enshrouded; but under the folds you felt it stir more buoyantly than ever, with sudden laughter and talk dropping from the windows, weighing oddly in the air: as if the town were encouraging her children to sleep by drawing the curtain; while they, very lively at bedtime, went on playing behind it.
4
The lecture room window-pane was full of treetops – a whirl and sweep of black twigs on the sky. The room swam and shone in a faint translucent flood; and a bird called on three wild inquiring notes. These skies of February twilights had primroses in them, and floods; and with the primroses, a thought of green.
The small creakings, breathings and shufflings of the lecture room went on. The men: rows of heads of young looking hair; bored restless shoulders hunched beneath their gowns; sprawling grey flannel legs. The women: attentive rather anxious faces under their injudicious hats; well-behaved backs; hands writing, writing. Clods, all of them, stones, worse than senseless things.
The lecturer thought smoothly aloud, not caring who besides himself listened to him.
It was a situation meet for one of those paragraphic poems beginning
‘The solemn greybeard lecturer drones on’;
and after a few more lines of subtly satirical description some dots and a fresh start:
‘Sudden a blackbird calls … Ah sweet! Who heeds?’
No one heeds. Attention to greybeards has made everyone insensible to blackbirds. The conclusion would develop neatly along those lines.
A year or two ago, how fervently you would have written, how complacently desired to publish that sort of thing! No regret could be quite so sickly as that with which one wished out of existence the published record of last year’s errors of taste.
‘My dear he’s the sort of person who’d make arrangements to have his juvenilia published after his death.’
That was the sort of condemnatory label Tony and his friends would attach
, spreading their hands, leaving it at that.
‘Roddy, where are you? Why do you never come?’
He flashed into mind, – leaning idly against the mantelpiece, listening with an obscure smile to Tony’s conversation.
It was the sort of evening on which anything might happen. Excitement took her suddenly by the throat and made her feeble and tingling to her finger-tips.
The last of the light fell lingeringly on the grey stone window-frame. If the gold bloom lasted till you counted fifty, it would be a good omen. One, two, three, four and so on to twenty, thirty, forty … crushing the temptation to count faster than her own heartbeats … forty-five… fifty.
It was still there, vanishing softly, but with a margin of at least another twenty to spare.
The ecstasy grew, making her stomach feel drained and helpless and beating in odd pulses all over her.
She bent over the desk, pretending to write, and making shaky pencil marks.
Somebody got up and switched on the light; and all at once darkness had fallen outside, and the window-pane was a purple-blue blank.
Roddy was in Tony’s room, leaning against the mantelpiece, quite near. She would pass Tony’s staircase on her way out: it was the one in the corner, facing the Chapel. She had seen his name every time she went by. Once she had met him coming out of the doorway, and he had looked through her; and once as she passed, someone in the court had shouted ‘Tony’! and he had leaned from his high window to reply.
Oh this intolerable lecture!
Suddenly it was over. She came out and saw the bulk of King’s Chapel in the deep twilight with its row of buttresses rising up pale, like giant ghosts.
‘I’ve left my essay behind in the lecture room. I must go back. Don’t wait for me.’
She went back a few steps until the gloom had swallowed them, and waited alone in the dark court. There was a light in Tony’s window. Lingeringly she crept towards it and paused beneath it, stroking the wall. She lifted her head and cried speechlessly: ‘Oh come! Come!’
Nobody came and looked out through the uncurtained pane. Nobody came running down the stairs.
And if she did not go on quickly the ’bus would start without her.
Let it start and then walk up and knock on Tony’s door and say quite simply:
‘I’ve missed my ’bus, so I’ve come to see Roddy.’
Roddy would spring forward to greet her. All would be made right with Tony.
For a moment that seemed the clear, delightful inevitable solution.
But what would their faces hide from her or betray? What unbearable amusement, suspicion, astonishment, contempt?
And what was there to do on such a night save to say to Roddy: ‘I love you,’ and then go away again? To dare everything, run to him and cry:
I am Lazarus come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I will tell you all.
But what if he should answer with that disastrous answer:
That is not what I meant at all,
That is not it, at all.
If he were to stare and coldly reply, with real speech:
‘Are you mad?’
Oh, but it should be risked! …
She stood still, hesitating, her hand pressing the wall, power and intoxication dying out of her. She felt the night cold and damp, and heard approaching footsteps, a torn fragment of laughter, a male voice raised for a moment in the distance.
She looked up once more at Tony’s window and saw that the curtains had been drawn; and she sprang away from the wall and ran towards the street in her urgent flight from wound, from the deliberate-seeming insult, the cruelty of drawn curtains.
The college ’bus was packed with girls. Heads were craning out in search of her.
‘Oh Judy! There you are! We’ve been keeping the ’bus and keeping it. What on earth happened to you?’
‘I couldn’t get in. The room was locked. And then – Oh dear, I’ve run so! Is there room for me?’
‘Yes, here. Come on, Judy. Here. Come and sit down. You’re all out of breath. Come in.’
They welcomed her. Their little voices and gestures seemed to stroke and pat. They were so glad she had come in time, so considerate and kindly, so safe.
The ’bus rolled through the streets, past where the solemn lamps and the buildings ended, out on to the road where was only the enveloping night wind. The ’bus swayed and the rows of bodies swayed and the faces smiled faintly across at each other, amused at their own shaking and jerking; but all half-dreaming, half-hypnotized by the noise and the motion; all warm, languid, silent.
The noise and the motion and the swaying faces seemed eternal. Nothing else had ever been, would ever be. Of course Roddy had not been there: he had never been there at all.
5
Martin was a great athlete. He was always rowing, always training; but once or twice he borrowed a motor-bicycle and came out to tea, when Judith and Jennifer gave combined tea-parties to young men. On these occasions his face was very red and he looked too big for the room. He was quite silent and stared with concentration at Judith and Jennifer alternately; and seemed not to take to his fellow guests. He was undoubtedly a heavy young man to have at a tea-party – a bad mixer. Jennifer’s jokes, oaths, and sallies brought no gleam to his countenance, and Jennifer was bored with him. Impossible to convince her that Martin was not a dull young man.
Martin dull? …
God-like in form he dived from the raft and swam over the river, swiftly, with laughter, water and sun upon his face. He sat among them all and smoked his pipe, looking kindly and comforting. You could depend on his eyes solicitously watching, his smile inviting you to come in, when all the others, neither kindly nor comforting, had shut the door and gone away. He was the one to whom Mariella chattered at her ease and made little childish jokes, calling him ‘darlin’,’ looking at him with candour and affection, sometimes even with a glint of mischief, as if she were a girl like any other girl; as if that something never fell across her clear face and obscured it. He shared a bedroom with Roddy, had a little screen at home, so he said, which Roddy had decorated, and given to him; he came walking up garden-paths with Roddy laughing and talking at his side.
In the darkness under the cherry tree he bent his head and tried to speak, twisting his scrap of cherry, trembling with enchantment. He had been a thing to fly from, surprised, with beating heart.
But when Jennifer said he was a dull young man, it was very difficult to argue with her; for it seemed almost as if, transplanted alone to this new world, he were indeed quite dull, rather ordinary.
He came to tea three times. The last time Judith went with him down the stairs – his deliberate, assured masculine tread sounding significant, almost alarming in that house of flustered uneven foolish-sounding steps – and said good night to him at the front door.
Fumbling with the lamps of his motor-bicycle he said:
‘Why can’t one ever see you alone?’
‘It’s not allowed, Martin. I can’t ask you to tea alone. And I can’t come to your rooms without a chaperon.’
‘Oh damn the chaperon. I shan’t ask you to tea at all. Can’t you break a footling rule for anybody you know as well as me?’
She said deprecatingly that it was impossible.
‘You mean you won’t.’
That was what she meant. It was not worth while to break rules for dull Martin.
‘Who’s that Jennifer person you’re always with?’
‘A person I’m very fond of –’ She flared at his tone.
‘Never see you anywhere without her,’ he muttered.
‘Well you needn’t come to tea with me.’
‘Oh I shan’t come again.’
‘I shan’t ask you.’
Silence fell. She looked up at the dark and starless sky; th
en at him still adjusting lamps, his head averted.
What were they about, parting in anger? How for indeed they were from the other world to mistrust and misunderstand so obstinately they had to quarrel!
Her heart misgave her suddenly at sight of the great building looming above her: there was no security in it, no kindness. Supposing when she went back Jennifer’s room were empty, and Jennifer, utterly weary of her, had taken the chance to escape, and were even now knocking at strangers’ doors, sure of her welcome? … How quickly without that form, that voice, all would crumble and dissolve and be but a lightless confusion! She should never have left the places where Martin stood by her side, listening, watching, waiting everywhere to wrap her in safety.
She said softly:
‘Martin, when is Roddy coming to see you?’
‘He was here,’ said Martin, ‘a week or two ago. Staying with Tony Baring,’ he added. And then again: ‘Only for a night or two.’
Then finally trying in great embarrassment to soothe the pain which, even to his ears, cried out terribly in the silence and could not find words to cover it.
‘I scarcely saw him myself. He was very busy – so many people to see. He’ll be up again soon, I expect, and then we must have a party.’
‘Oh yes, Martin … You know, it’s very naughty of him. He said he’d come and see me.’
Her voice was thin and cheerful.
‘He’s very forgetful,’ said Martin helplessly.
‘I suppose,’ she suggested lightly, ‘he forgot even to ask after me.’
‘Oh no, he asked after you. I’m sure he did.’
She laughed.
‘Well I must go in … Tell him when you write to him … No, don’t tell him anything. But Martin, you must come and see me sometimes, please, please, – in this hateful place. I feel I shall lose you all again. You know Mother’s going to live abroad for a year or two? So I shan’t be there in the summer, next door. It’s awful. She let the house without telling me. What shall I do without it? Please come and see me. Or listen, I tell you what: it doesn’t seem to work somehow, your coming here. I can’t talk to you and I feel I don’t know you; but when the days get longer we’ll go for a long walk together, miles and miles. Shall we? Remember!’
Dusty Answer Page 14