“We’re not much use when it comes to a fight, are we?” said Jane, looking at her own right hand.
“Not with tigers, at any rate,” said Jack. He guffawed. “A man I met had a narrow squeak once—a perfect mad-man, mind you. He and another chap had been out, and they’d come across a tiger and put a brace of bullets in her, but she got away. What did they do but follow her. The prints were clear as day in the jungle, but when they came out into a clearing they lost them. So they separated to have a snoop round. This chap said that he was just bending down to take a look when there was an earsplitting roar and up comes the tiger from a ditch fifteen yards off, in a pretty savage temper, and went straight at him. He hadn’t time to do more than put out his rifle with both hands—it was just as well he did—and then he was bowled over with the tiger on top of him. Luckily the other man noticed what was up and got a lucky shot in her brain as she was turning again. The shekarries were scared blue. He’s still got the rifle, and he showed it me—it had caught the tiger’s first swipe, and there were claw-marks a quarter of an inch deep down the butt, and the trigger and guard were bent flat.” Jack leaned forward with leaden sincerity. “Absolutely flat.”
Robin expressed amazement. “But you don’t go on foot, do you?” he said.
“Surely when it was wounded——”
“On a formal shoot there’s elephants. But even then it isn’t all jam. You’d imagine you’d feel as safe as houses up on an elephant——”
“Well, I don’t know,” said Jane.
“Oh, you do. At least you do till our friend stripes comes along. But you see it’s like this. The tiger goes for the elephant—I’ve seen a tiger spring right up on an elephant’s head—clinging, you know, with the claws in. And then it all depends how the elephant behaves. It’s liable to get bothered, and anything may happen. It may try to shake the tiger off, and only succeed in shaking the poor bloke out of the howdah. Or the other elephants may get the wind up. What it ought to do is stand still and let the guns pot the tiger till it drops off. But they don’t always see it that way.”
There was general laughter.
“Oh, it’s a terrific thrill,” said Jack Stormalong, sitting forward with an eagerness that suggested he was still a trifle drunk. “You’ve no idea. A tiger will go on fighting till it drops. You imagine yourself surrounded by elephants as big as houses, with fellows on top putting both barrels into you. You’d leg it for cover as fast as you could. But I’ve seen a tiger with as many as eight bullets in it go on trying to beat the whole crowd till he drops. Absolute rage incarnate. You can’t call it courage; it’s more than that.” He studied the squashy end of his cigarette for a moment. “And you look down, you know … if he got you he’d tear you to bits. You can’t help feeling scared. That’s where the fun comes in.”
“I think it would go out, with me,” said Jane.
In response to a question from Robin, Jack began to describe the particular tiger-shoot he had attended, and they fell into a discussion of rifles; calibres, velocities, bores. Jack’s elephant had lurched, causing him to put his foot into the luncheon-basket and break a siphon: this had impressed him more than the destruction of the tiger. Robin asked if a tiger’s stripes were really effective camouflage; Jack Stormalong lit another cigarette and began to tell him.
Katherine had had enough. Surely, she thought, Jane can’t be less bored than I am. Experimentally she caught Jane’s eye, trying to express resignation, and rather to her surprise Jane gave a little annoyed gesture, which Katherine found hard to interpret. She could not think that they were both annoyed at the same thing, because although listening to the half-intelligible ramble of this English Colonial Official was irritating enough, she could have borne it on any other night than this. What made her desperate was the invisible running-out of time; a stupid thing to resent, and yet it galled.
She jumped up, “I think I’ll go out for a little,” she said.
She was out of the french windows before anyone could protest, and a glance back from the foot of the steps showed she was not being followed. For this she was thankful. At the moment she wanted only time enough to calm herself; it was nothing serious. All she needed was a little space to look around her for the last time and accept the fact that she was going. When this was done—when she had made her peace, as she called it—she could return and mix with them on equal terms.
It was very solacing to be alone. She looked about her at the garden and the sky. It was after nine o’clock; the sun had set and the trees hung motionless in a barely-visible mist; down towards the west there ran a vast fan of tiny clouds, ribbed and golden. She walked slowly along the path by the tennis-court, looking at the broad bed of flowers. Many of them had softly closed. From here she passed through into the kitchen-garden, where the air was richer with a confused smell of vegetables; on an impulse she went over to the tap and tried to stop it dripping. Twist as she could, the drops still slowly formed and fell onto the stones, and at last she gave it up. Let it go on. A few grasses touched her bare legs as she walked on towards the blue door, and she shivered, although it was not cold. The key turned easily in the lock and she found herself again on the short mown bank, remembered so vividly from her first evening, at the edge of the river that moved contentedly past.
It was always bigger than she expected, and she sat down on the grass to watch it flow. Lazily throwing a twig upstream, she watched it drift slowly level with her and then pass on, and she wondered where the river rose, how many towns and bridges it passed on its course, and past what fields the twig would be carried in the half-light of next morning, before she was awake. She had never even found out its name. The line of trees on the bank were reflected in it, thin upflung branches being flattened in the reflection to dark gesturing masses. Underneath them she could see small erratic shapes flying. They dipped and swerved furiously, and she realized after a few seconds that they were bats. They were too far away to alarm her.
But she withdrew her eyes to the foreground again, and noticed that the fastening of the tiny boat-house—little more than a low shack—had not been padlocked. She got up and went to it, and looking in saw that the punt was there. Half-experimentally she drew it silently out, and climbed in. It rocked soothingly. She wondered if it would be wrong of her to paddle it a few hundred yards downstream and back: it was no use her unstrapping the pole, but she thought it would be quite easy to manage with a paddle that lay on the seat beside her. Would they mind? Surely not, on her last evening; and even if they did, there would be little enough time left for them to mind in. She picked up the paddle and dipped it in the water.
“Are you stealing our boat?” said Robin. He was standing on the bank behind her.
“Oh——” She dropped her hands. “You left the door unfastened.”
“Did I?” He glanced towards it. “No, don’t get out,” he added as she prepared to rise. “I’ll come with you. Or would you rather go alone?”
“Please come.”
He sat beside her, taking the other paddle from the back, and, paddling together, they felt the punt draw away from the bank, rocking lightly on the sensitive water. She regulated her strokes with his.
“I hope you did not mind when I left you,” she said presently. “I was a bit tired.”
“Oh, there’s no stopping old Jack, once he gets talking,” Robin said. He smiled.
The evening was so still, it was like setting forth into silence itself, that sharpened the noise of their paddles stirring the dull river and of an occasional fish breaking the surface with a tiny liquid explosion. As they proceeded downstream, sending ripples towards either bank, the trees fell behind and fields opened around them. On one side the bank had been built up with bricks, now grown dull and mossy after much weather, and an iron ring fastened in them was rusty and disused. The water was the colour of pewter, for the afterglow had faded rapidly and left a quality of light that resembled early dawn. It had drawn off the brightness from the meadows and stubb
le-fields, that were now tarnished silver and pale yellow, and the shadows were slowly mixing with the mist. In this way the edges of her emotions had blurred, and they now overlaid each other like twin planes of water running over wet sand, the last expenditure of succeeding waves. There was no longer any discord in them: she felt at peace.
“Robin, what is this river called?” she asked after a while.
“Why, the Thames, of course.”
“Not the real Thames?”
“Certainly.” And then he added with mild amusement: “If we’d lived in prehistoric times, before England was an island, I could nearly have taken you home. The Thames used to flow into the Rhine.”
She glanced at him. His expression was friendly but serious, as if concentrating; at the end of each stroke he gave the blade a twist sideways, to neutralize the fact that his strokes were stronger than hers. There was something formal about him, as if he were a figure in allegory, carrying her a stage further on some undefined journey, and she smiled to remember her discarded belief that he might at any moment say something she would never forget. She doubted if she would ever think that again of anyone: with this in mind, she stopped paddling, and after two more strokes Robin allowed his paddle to trail diagonally in the water, so that the punt’s direction slowly altered, and it drifted towards the bank, about eighty yards from where they had started. In time the front of the boat crushed over the reeds with a dry crackle, and they came to rest, Robin digging his paddle in the mud to prevent their moving with the current. He folded his arms and looked in front of him.
It’s come to an end, she thought. No matter what she thought might happen, or what she had done that she regretted, it was all now part of the past. Tomorrow she would undertake the long journey back to her normal life, and this isolated excursion to England would remain in her mind as something irrelevant and beautiful. For better or worse, it was over; it had been dull, perhaps; Robin had been less exciting than she had thought he would be, but that might be for the best. The parents had been tactful and quite uninterested in her, which had been a good thing. The house, so comfortable and unpretentious, would stand for many years yet among the trees, and she would not miss it. As for what she would tell her friends, she would distort her visit into something amusing. There was nothing sacred about it. Yet for all that as they floated there she wanted to add nothing more, not a word or a look. It was finished. Her mind was free to be diverted by the surface of things she had no need to remember—the sound of water, of birds close at hand, the remote sound of a train-whistle. Her attention rose and fell from these things as the shadow of a ball thrown against the side of a building rises and drops back again; they were, she felt, tiny decorative tracings on the finished vase.
Suddenly he took hold of her.
She gave a start and bit her tongue.
He ducked his head and kissed her inexpertly with tight lips, as if dodging something that swept above their heads. It was not a bit like lovemaking, and she never thought of it as such till afterwards. He kept his face hidden against her hair. At the end of this unfathomable interval, he shivered, and the shiver changed to a short scrambling shudder, almost an abortive attempt to climb on her; then he slowly relaxed. Still he would not look her in the face. In the end he released her, carelessly.
Neither of them said anything.
After a time he dragged up his paddle, washed the blade, and they turned upstream again.
When they got back, she went upstairs to her room, tenderly moving the end of her tongue to and fro without knowing what she was doing. She felt dazed, as if she had nearly been run over in the street. Sitting at her nearly-empty dressing table, she looked at herself, trembling. The evening whispered outside, the quiet evening that had suddenly risen up against her in one great stamping chord, like the beginning of music she would never hear.
There was a bang on the door. She turned quickly. It was Jane.
“Oh, you are here,” she said. She hung onto the door-knob, swaying slightly as if drunk, and breathing hard. Then she put her hand to her forehead as if faint, and gasped with laughter. “What a life,” she said. “Your tactful exit … glory.” She flopped on the bed, then instantly scrambled up to say: “I’ve just had an honourable proposal of marriage!”
She stared at Katherine.
“Well?”
“I said I would.”
PART THREE
1
But the snow did not come. The sky remained as immovable as a pebble frozen in the surface of a pond. The lights had to be kept on in offices, and some people worked in their coats; those who looked out of the windows of expensive centrally-heated flats still saw the bare, motionless trees, the railings, the half-obliterated government notices.
It was easier to forget about it in the city, however. For one thing it was Saturday afternoon, and by one o’clock most people were free to go home. They could turn their backs on the window, and the slab of garden, and read the newspaper by the fire till teatime. Or if they had no real home, they could pay to sit in the large cinemas, where it seemed warmer because it was dark. The cafeterias filled up early, and the, shoppers lingered over their teas, dropping cigarette-ends into their empty cups, unwilling to face the journey back to where they lived. Everywhere people indoors were loth to move. Men stayed in their clubs, in billiard saloons, in public bars till closing time. Soldiers lay discontentedly in Y.M.C.A. rest rooms, writing letters or turning over magazines several weeks old.
And meanwhile, the winter remained. It was not romantic or picturesque: the snow, that was graceful in the country, was days old in the town: it had been trodden to a brown powder and shovelled into the gutters. Where it had not been disturbed, on burnt-out buildings, on warehouse roofs or sheds in the railways yards, it made the scene more dingy and dispirited. Women went round to the coal yards with perambulators and large baskets; elderly men picked up pieces of lath from heaps of rubble: there were no fires in waiting-rooms. Paper-sellers with the three o’clock edition stood well within the locked entrances of banks. The papers said nothing about the weather, but gave lists of football matches and race-meetings that had been cancelled.
On one of the stations, a crowd watched a porter come out and chalk up on a board that the Paddington train was eighty-five minutes late.
2
Katherine came out of a self-service café where she had lunched. The time was three minutes after one o’clock, half an hour after Miss Green had left her to go home.
She was angry with herself for behaving unreasonably and for the knowledge that she was still not quite controlled. What was wrong, to make her rush away from her lodging, leaving no message and making no arrangements? She would only have to go back again, and her steps took the direction of Merion Street as if walking to a scaffold. What was the matter with her? Her feelings were like a flight of birds that swoop over to one corner of a field and then stop, all trembling equidistantly in the air, and then come streaming back, like a banner tossed first one way, then the other. Had there been anything more exciting than the thought of this letter? Was she afraid of meeting Robin, as Robin? No, of course not. Wasn’t such a meeting as Robin suggested exactly what she had anticipated as being practically unavoidable? Why was she acting so immaturely?
Yet she almost wished she had not written to Jane. The truth was, that she had set too much store on a meeting for it to happen so quickly. She was gripped by the reaction that follows the granting of a wish. Had she pushed herself forward, had she cornered them so that they could do nothing but make such a response? And was this proposed meeting a compromise between ignoring her and having to invite her to stay? At this construction her nervousness increased. She was again brought up against the fact that she might not, according to English standards, be acting correctly, and she would sooner be ignored than accepted unwillingly. Looking over the letter again, she had to admit that he did not sound overjoyed at the prospect. Conceivably Mrs. Fennel had directed him to meet her and fob her off in
some way—for at this distance of time they were all strangers. If she met Robin now, in this street—it was an hour after twelve and he might well be on his way to her address—she would probably not know him. He would be in officer’s uniform, deep-voiced, full-grown. She stopped on the pavement opposite Merion Street, and looked cautiously around her. Her fingers encountered a bent cigarette at the bottom of her coat pocket, and she meditatively put it into her mouth and lit it.
No, she decided suddenly, she would leave no message. This was somehow not the kind of meeting she wanted—inconclusive, on strange ground, brief, finding her unprepared. She would let things fall by chance, as they would; and in any case there was no need. If she left a note in her room or even on her door, he would not see it, and the only alternative was to tell the chemist’s wife that she would return about half-past seven at night—which the chemist’s wife knew already and would certainly tell him if he called. If he could see her then, presumably he would; if he couldn’t, no messages would alter the fact.
In the meantime, then, there was this handbag. She would just have enough time to return it before starting work again. It seemed quite natural to her to set off on this errand as she made her way towards the Bank Street bus-stop once more. This day was already so unlike other days that it was beginning to resemble an odyssey in a dream: to find herself in strange places, looking for strange people, following out thin threads of coincidence—it was almost as if an enchantment had been put on her to keep her away from the only two places where Robin knew she might be. But it would be awkward if she met him in the street.
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