Above the quiet secretly-stirring town, roofs, towers and spires floated in a pale gold wash of light. What was the mystery of Cambridge in the evening? Footfalls struck with a pang on the heart, faces startled with strange beauty, and every far appearing or disappearing form seemed significant.
And when they got back to College, even that solid red-brick barrack was touched with mystery. The corridors were long patterns of unreal light and shadow. Girls’ voices sounded remote as in a dream, with a murmuring rise and fall and light laughter behind closed doors. The thrilling smell of cowslips and wall-flowers was everywhere, like a cloud of enchantment.
In Jennifer’s room, someone had let down the sun-blind, and all was in throbbing shadow. Her great copper bowl was piled, as usual, with fruit, and they ate from it idly, without hunger.
‘Now a little work,’ said Judith firmly. ‘Think! only three weeks till Mays …’
But it was impossible to feel moved.
Jennifer, looking childish and despondent, sat down silently by the window with a book.
Judith wrote on a sheet of paper:
Tall oaks branch-charmed by the tamest stars; and studied it. That was a starry night: the sound of the syllables made stars prick out in dark treetops.
Under it she wrote:
… the foam
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.
What a lot there were for the sea and the seashore! … The page became fuller.
Upon the desolate verge of light
Yearned loud the iron-bosomed sea.
The unplumbed salt estranging sea.
From the lone sheiling of the misty island
Mountains divide us and a world of seas:
But still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland;
And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.
Ah, that said it all…
The lines came flocking at random.
But the majestic river floated on,
Out of the mist and hum of that low land
Into the frosty starlight, and there flowed
Rejoicing through the hushed Chorasmian waste
Under the solitary moon …
Ah sunflower weary of time
That countest the steps of the sun …
Ah sunflower! … Where were they – the old gardens of the sun where my sunflower wished to go? They half unfolded themselves at the words…
Nous n’irons plus aux bois
Les lauriers sont coupés.
O mors quam amara est memoria tua homini pacem habenti in substantias suis …
How with one tongue those both cried alas!
And then in the end, sleep and a timeless peace
Nox est perpétua una dormienda.
There were so many tumbling and leaping about in your head you could go on for ever …
Now to study them. What did it all mean? Was there any thread running through them with which to make a theory? Anybody could write down strings of quotations, – but a student of English literature was expected to deal in theories. It was something to do with the sound … the way sound made images, shell within shell of them softly unclosing … the way words became colours and scents … and the surprise when it happened, the ache of desire, the surge of excitement, the sense of fulfilment, the momentary perception of something unknowable … Some sort of truth, some answer to the question: What is poetry? … No it was no good. But it had been very enjoyable, writing things down like that and repeating them to yourself.
Jennifer was half asleep with her head upon the window-sill. The bowl of fruit burned in the dimness. How like Jennifer was her room! Yellow painted chairs, a red and blue rug on the hearth, cowslips in coloured bowls and jars, one branch of white lilac in a tall blue vase; the guitar with its many ribbons lying on the table; a silken Italian shawl, embroidered with great rose and blue and yellow flowers flung over the screen: wherever you looked colour leapt up at you; she threw colour about in profuse disorder and left it. Her hat of pale green straw with its little wreath of clover lay on the floor. Nobody else had attractive childish hats like hers. A wide green straw would remind you of Jennifer to the end of your life; and beneath it you would see the full delicious curve of her cheek and chin, her deep-shadowed eyes, her lips that seemed to hold all life in their ardent lines.
She turned her head and smiled sleepily.
‘Hullo!’ said Judith. ‘Haven’t we been quiet? I’ve done such a lot of work.’
‘I’ve done none. I couldn’t remember the difference between ethics and aesthetics. What rot it all is! … Now listen and we’ll hear a nightingale. He’s tuning up.’
They leaned out of the window.
The icy aching flute in the cedar called and called on two or three notes, uncertain, dissatisfied; then all at once found itself and bubbled over in rich and complicated rapture.
Jennifer was listening, tranced in her strange immobility, as if every other sense were suspended to allow her to hear aright.
She roused herself at last as Judith bent to kiss her good night.
‘Good night my – darling – darling –’ she said. They stared at each other with tragic faces. It was too much, this happiness and beauty. The end of the first year.
8
The next moment so it seemed, the soft and coloured autumn days were there again; the corridors, the echoing steps, the vast female yell of voices in Hall, the sense of teeming life in all the little rooms, behind the little closed doors – all these started again to weave their strange timeless dream; and the second year had begun.
Midway through the term came Martin’s letter.
Dear Judith,
Roddy is in Cambridge for two nights, staying with Tony. He wants to see you. Will you come to tea with me tomorrow at 4.30? I am to tell you he will never forgive you (a) if you don’t come (b) if you come with a chaperon. He says that chance alone prevented him from being your bachelor uncle; and that I myself was a maiden aunt from the cradle. So please come.
Martin.
Dear Martin
Bachelor uncles are notorious; and curious things are apt to happen to strictly maiden aunts as all we enlightened moderns know. But an aunt and uncle bound by holy matrimony are considered safe (as safety goes in this world) and I have notified the authorities of their brief presence in the university and am cordially permitted to wait on them at tea tomorrow at 4.30.
Judith.
Judith looked around Martin’s room. It was untidy and rather dirty, with something forlorn and pathetic and faintly animal about it, like all masculine rooms. It made you want to look after him. Men were helpless children; it was quite true. You might have known Martin’s room would give you a ridiculous pull at the heart.
‘I’m afraid things are in a bit of a mess,’ said Martin, blowing cigarette ash off the mantelpiece into the fire.
He was smoking an enormous pipe. His face was red. His great form looked lumbering and shapeless in an ancient tweed coat and a pair of voluminous grey flannel trousers.
‘How are you, Judith?’ His brown eye fixed itself on her. He was very shy.
‘I’ve been ill, Martin.’
‘Oh! …’ He looked troubled and embarrassed. ‘Did you – did you have a decent doctor?’
‘Oh yes. It was almost pneumonia, but not quite.’
‘I didn’t know you’d been ill …’
‘You haven’t been to see me for ages, Martin.’
‘I know. I’ve been so busy.’ Violently he blew the ash about. What a shame to pretend to reproach him. He was obviously overcome … ‘And I didn’t think you wanted … I suppose you’re all right again now?’
Footsteps sounded outside on the stair. Judith collected herself and sat rigid. The door opened and Roddy, smiling, eager, debonair, came into the room.
&nbs
p; ‘Hullo Judy! Marvellous to see you.’
‘Roddy!’
He stood before her and looked down into her face.
‘I thought I was never going to see you again, Judy. You’re looking marvellous.’
He was going to be irresistible. Already something in her was starting to leap up in response to him; and watching his face, she saw with a terrible pang that it was true, unarguable, proved over again more clearly than ever, that he had some quality which separated him from everybody else in the whole world, startled the imagination and made him of appalling significance to her.
‘I’m cold. Thank God for a good fire. It’s starting to snow.’ He flung himself down on the hearth-rug. ‘Trust Martin to make a good thick atmosphere with no beastly fresh air about it. Tea! Tea! Tea! Let me make you some toast, Judy. I make it so well.’
While he toasted great hunks of bread, Martin buttered scones and cut the cake, and Judith poured out tea.
They chattered, joked, teased each other. They played absurd drawing and rhyming games. Judith made them laugh with malicious stories of dons and students. Roddy threw back his head, his whole face wrinkled and flattened with silent laughter, his eyes gleaming with amusement under their lids. Martin stared, laughed, Ha! Ha! – stared again. They encouraged her, listened to her, were delighted with her; and the old sense of abnormal self-assurance grew within her taut mind.
At last she made herself look at the clock. So late! There would barely be time to get back before Hall.
‘I’ve got a car outside,’ said Roddy carelessly, ‘I can run you out in no time.’
He added, interrupting her thanks:
‘It isn’t mine, it’s got no hood, it always breaks down and it’s hellishly uncomfortable, so I don’t advise it really.’
It sounded as if he were suddenly regretting his offer, trying to withdraw it. She looked at him, all her confidence collapsing in a moment. His face had become a mask.
She said swiftly.
‘If you would take me I should be very grateful.’ Her voice sounded to herself strained, beseeching, horrible.
He bowed.
It took ten minutes to get the car started, with Martin and Roddy madly swinging her by turns.
‘Good night, Martin. Thank you for my lovely tea party. I’ll see you again soon, won’t I?’
He nodded, looking gravely down at her in the lamp-light.
‘Don’t catch cold,’ he said. There was something dejected about his attitude, a flatness in his voice … Things had gone wrong for him … Ever since that panic-stricken voice had broken in on the laughter and talk, the game for three, with its vibrating cry: ‘If you would take me home…’ from that moment all had been faintly blown upon by a ruffle of uneasy wind. They were no longer three persons, but two men and one woman.
She knew it and loathed herself because Martin knew it too.
‘I’m due to dine with Tony in twenty minutes,’ said Roddy. ‘You’d better come along too. I’ll call for you on my way back. I shan’t be long.’
Roddy’s voice had forced a note of carelessness … as if he were trying to pretend to Martin that nothing had happened; that the female had not suddenly singled him out and stretched an inviting hand to him as he stood beside his friend.
Even Roddy was aware of it.
‘No,’ said Martin, ‘I won’t dine with Tony. I’ll see you tomorrow perhaps.’
He waved his hand and turned away. The car started. She was alone with a strange man.
The night was dark, with a piercing wind and a faint flurry of snow in the air. Roddy drove at a great pace, and she sat beside him in silence, her shoulder touching his.
‘Cold?’ he said suddenly.
‘No, I don’t feel – anything.’
All of life was concentrating in her dark beating mind: her body was insensible to the weather. She saw the gates of College fly past, its lights gleamed and were gone; and she could not speak. On they went, the long straight empty road flung before them in small lengths by the headlights and rolled up into nothingness behind them, cast away for ever.
He stopped the car suddenly.
‘Where’s this place?’
‘I think we’ve passed it long ago.’
The wind took her small voice away from him. He leaned towards her.
‘What?’
She turned to him.
‘I think we’ve passed it long ago.’
‘I think we have.’
Silence. The great wind blowing through illimitable deeps of night lifted and whirled her beyond time and space. She saw his hand lying on the wheel – a pale blur; and her own crept out and lay beside it; and she stared at them both. He watched her hand fall beside his and did not move a hair’s breadth nearer to touch it. He and she were alone together. No need for speech or movement. Their hands would lie motionless, side by side, for ever and ever.
She heard him laugh softly; and as he laughed her hand came quickly to her lap.
‘Well, what d’you want to do?’ he said very low.
‘I don’t want to go back.’
‘Do you want to go on?’
‘Yes.’
The car went forward again. Once she leaned towards him and said in his ear:
‘Roddy!’
‘Yes?’
‘You didn’t want to go back, did you?’
‘No.’
She lay back again, mindlessly at peace in the midst of the roaring of the wind, and the road’s monotonous unfolding.
Once he burst out laughing, patted her knee and cried:
‘Aren’t we mad?’
His voice rang boyishly, happily.
Now came the snow, thinly at first, but soon in wild drifting clouds, blotting out the road, settling thick and fast over all, sifting and piling on the wind-screen.
‘Oh Lord, we must turn,’ said Roddy. This is frightful.’
He turned the car and then stopped her to light a cigarette. She saw his face, lit by the flare of the match, glow suddenly, warmly out of the darkness with unknown curves and strange planes of light and shadow, and narrowed eyes, eyes not human, never-to-be-forgotten.
He waved the dwindling flame in her face.
‘Solemn face! What are you staring at? Smile – quick, quick, before the match goes out!’
The match went out.
‘I am smiling, Roddy.’
‘That’s right. Poor Judy covered with snow! There you sit, so modest and unassuming. Shall I get you home alive?
‘I don’t care.’
She slipped her arm through his, and he gave it a quick friendly pressure and drove on.
Now they were before the gates of College. After all they had not driven very far. Time started again with a reluctant painful beat as the car crept in under the archway, and she realized that it was little more than an hour since they had left Martin. It seemed so short now – less than a moment; a pause between a breath and another breath.
They sat side by side in the car without moving.
‘I suppose I must go in now,’ she said at last. ‘They’ll still be at Hall.’
He shivered and beat his hands together. She took one and felt it, and it was icy.
‘Your hands. Oh Roddy! Will you come in and get warm by my fire?’
He seemed to be considering and then said in a stilted way:
‘If I may – just for a minute – I’ve got rather chilled driving without gloves.’
She could find nothing to say. A cold shy politeness had descended on them both. She led the way into the hall and up the stairs. At every step snow fell off them: their shoulders and arms were covered in it. The corridors were silent and deserted, echoing only her light footsteps, and his heavier ones. She heard her tread, and his following after it, marching, marching towards her far-off
door. Judith was bringing Roddy, Judith was, in sober truth, bringing Roddy to her room. If anyone saw her there would be trouble.
Somebody – Jennifer perhaps – must have drawn the curtains and heaped the fire in the little room. The warmth drew out the smell of the chrysanthemums; and their heavy golden heads, massed in a blue jar, held mysterious intensity of life in the firelight. She switched on the reading lamp, and all the colours in the room leapt up dimly, secretly: purple, blue and rose-colour glowed around them, half-lit, half-obscured.
‘This is rather seductive,’ he said. He sank on his knees by the fire and held out his hands to the blaze, looking about him with a faint smile. She came and knelt beside him; and his eyes fastened narrowly on her face.
‘It’s like you: seductive,’ he said softly.
‘Oh Roddy! Seductive. That’s all it is. I see it now. I hate it. Am I nothing more than that?’
‘You … I don’t know what you are. I can’t make you out. You never behave as I think you probably will.’
‘I’m glad of that.’
‘Why are you glad?’
‘Because I believe you ascribe to me the worst motives, – the most ambiguous. You suspect me – you guard yourself against me.’
‘I don’t, Judy.’
‘Ah you do. But you needn’t. I won’t do you any harm. Unless being – very fond of you can do you harm. But I don’t think I’m a femme fatale.’
‘I don’t know what you are. You disturb me very much. You seem to me completely incalculable. Your eyes watch me and watch me. Such marvellous eyes.’
She lifted them to his in a long steady look and remained silent.
‘You’re very nice,’ he said. ‘Rather a dear. I believe you’re quite without guile really. Why do you trust people so? It’s very foolish of you.’
‘Is it foolish of me to trust you?’
‘Incredibly foolish.’ He added, raising his voice and speaking slowly: ‘It’s no good trying to make me – adequate.’
‘Ah you like to destroy yourself to me.’
‘But don’t you see? I go through the days in a sort of apathy; blind and deaf; blinder and deafer every day. I never think, I never care. I’d much better be dead, only I’m too lazy to shoot myself.’
Dusty Answer Page 16