The straight green back disappeared, and she quickened her steps, making a detour.
The verses in the youth’s hand were those he had made during the night, repeating them over and over again, and then rising to write them down by the light of the paling dawn. As he walked he sang them softly to himself, fitting notes to the words as the harper at the castle had taught him. He would have vowed they were about La Beale Alys and about nobody and nothing else. Here, jargon of armour and all, and altered only a little, is the rhyme he had made –
What need you other harness than your own
When cap-à-pie your Beauty is your gear?
Your whiteness self is all your habergeon,
Your helm the basnet of your sable hair,
Vambrace your snowy arm, bosom your mam’lière
So do I feign you built in Steadfastness,
Castled in Truth and in all Virtue towered,
That lo, I keep for very joyfulness
Ardent my vigil, as by you empowered
To guard that gentle gear while as you lie embowered!
It cannot be but on some time agone,
Whiles I ne saw no face, a faery arm
Rose in a woodland or a fountain lone,
Bearing a chrism-white brand whereof the charm,
‘Use me for ladies all, but keep her most from harm’,
Her and our Very Lord, whose blessèd Grail
Joseph in duty brought –
Suddenly his song died on his lips. Beyond the wide-spreading oak under which he stood, he saw La Beale Alys herself approaching.
The eyes under the dark brows were modestly downcast, yet it could hardly be that she had not heard his song. He wondered that she should appear not to have done so, as also that she should be thus early abroad and unattended. He could not guess that she had slept no more than he. Had he guessed it he would have concluded that she was restless because Sir Sandys, her husband, was away.
Then she raised her dark-fringed eyes, and he advanced and bade her good-morrow, bending diligently over the dimpled knuckles that issued from the gold-buttoned sleeve. He asked her whether her rest had been good. In her reply she gave him a name that was not his, but one of the hundred names her fancy had for him.
‘Neither good nor ill, since I have not rested, Pleindamour,’ she answered. And with suddenly averted face, she added, ‘But you know not the meaning of that.’
He protested. Was he not, by her husband’s leave, body and soul at her command?
‘Nay, madam, but I do. It were untrue to say that I have not closed my eyes, but slept I have not.’
‘No? Then of what were the thoughts that kept you awake?’ she asked him.
‘Of you, as ever,’ was his prompt reply, and he went straight on to enquire when her husband, Sir Sandys, was due to return.
‘Sir Sandys!’ she replied, with a dropping of her lids again.
For La Beale Alys was a little out of suits with the grave and preoccupied knight who was her husband. A proper enough knight of his body he was, and of a good head withal, since in his charge were all the engines for the defence of the castle; and as for the good man’s worship of herself, she had little fault to find with that either, except that he worshipped somewhat frequently at a distance, when he went forth to buy his pitch and hides and oil and other provender. When he did return, he was for ever exercising his men-at-arms at their stations, or overhauling his catapults and fenders, or giving directions to his builders for the repair of this or that, or poking his nose into masses of clammy mortar, or melting something perchance, or greasing something else, or poring over plans that the artificers had thumbed, or – but La Beale Alys could have talked a whole summer’s day about Sir Sandys and his occupations and then not have finished. The good knight had been like that these seven years.
‘What song was that you were singing even now?’ she suddenly asked him, thus informing him that she had heard his song.
He turned his head quickly as something rustled in a thicket. Then, turning his eyes back to her, he told her that it was a song he had made in her honour.
‘Mine?’ She gave a little laugh, and her hands made a slight movement towards the jet-black hair in its gold tiring. ‘What ails your eyes that you should see me thus, Pleindamour? Already I am old!’
He vowed (but his glance was on the thicket again) that nothing ailed his eyes – not one of his hawks saw more keenly than did this same love of his. Her answer was to tease herself and him.
‘But this brow is lined! This hair, what know you of the grey that is hidden in it ? A steel cap, pardie! –’
It was only a squirrel in the thicket after all . . . As he turned to her again he would not have it either that brow was wrinkled or her hair grey. Neither in truth were they, for all it pleased her to say so, and this time her look at him went farther than her words.
‘My whiteness my harness! And what know you of my whiteness? It is tidings to me that I am safest in my smock! By my reasoning a heavier habergeon were not amiss! And I like not much this bricklayer’s work of steadfastness. That is a trowelful of Sir Sandys’ mortar indeed! We shall be greasing the portcullis chains anon! Castled! Towered! . . . Come, let us have this fortification again, since it is thus you see me –’
She was merry enough, this early-rising lady who counted her grey hairs before they came; but it was a little in despite both of herself and him. She intended no harm (more than a very little), yet she could not leave it alone. It was much on her mind that men, and not women, had invented this stuff of the stone-yard and the armourer’s shop that they made their verses of. For herself, she accounted a little mirth in due season as more to the purpose. The day would come when this damoiseau would so account it too. He, too, would learn that ladies were made of quite other material. At present he knew as much about them as he knew about unicorns, and it was in order that he might know a little more that she sent him so constantly on boot-less errands, and watched his face when she called him Pleindamour or some other soft name, and secretly thought his verses naught but his running and leaping and catching of horses a great deal.
And it was in order that he might know anything else he wished that she had dropped her glove one day as she had gone into her bower, and had been careful not to look back.
‘Many an one in your place – ’ she began in a low, tremulous voice.
‘Madam?’ he asked.
‘ – would sing again,’ she ended unexpectedly, on a laugh that he did not understand.
He did not understand, and neither did he know how already she was busying herself as he began his song over again. Her lips were pursed . . . Her whiteness her gear? He had written truer than he knew! He must needs take the habergeon on trust, yet she could give him some guerdon of it –
With her hands hidden in the ivy that mantled the oak, she was busily stripping away the score of little buttons that fastened the tight-fitting velvet sleeve.
It cannot be but on some time agone,
Whiles I ne saw no face, a faery arm
Rose in a woodland or a fountain lone,
Bearing a chrism-white brand whereof the charm,
‘Use me for ladies all, but keep her most from harm.’
Suddenly his song ceased under her darkling gaze. He wondered whether she was ailing that she should look so. Her voice was smothered, passionate.
‘Yes, I have whiteness for a season or two longer – then all will be too white! And a song about my whiteness contents you! You make a song for my ears when I go hungry! You speak of brassarts and vambraces – ’ she broke out. ‘Would you know how white? And how white the rest? Look – be you and this oak my witness!’
And somewhat to his surprise, for indeed he thought her ailing, she stripped away the velvet sleeve, showing an arm still
as young as any.
You meant mischief, La Beale Alys. You planned this last night in your chamber as you tossed – nay, weeks ago, when you dropped that glove. But you waste your trouble when you call that oak to witness. That is no dark lady’s oak, has no help for such as wear raven’s-feathers for brows. You never gave it a single hair of your head, nor accepted from it a garter to bind your knee. No vows passed between you and it; that did not change when your race supplanted the red. Therefore seek another oak, La Beale Alys. Every rustling branch of this one, every tingling root, was married to another ages before you were born.
Nor shall it avail you that he praises your arm as in duty bound, nor that he kisses its finger-tips, so that for a moment his hair lies warm upon it. You are in different woods, you and he. Your wood is the everyday wood you see from the castle-walls, the wood that provides timber for joists and food for swine; but his is Brocehaunde. You may see it now if you care to look into his wide and wondering eyes –
For a light breeze stirs in the oak, and he listens and slowly smiles, as if returning some soft and musical echo of laughter within its boughs. Already you are fastening up those little golden buttons again, but he gazes at the place where your arm lately was, as if its image were still there. Across the glade something moves in the bushes; there is a soft scampering across the clearing . . .
All that your eyes are aware of is a hart, startled to find that it is not alone in the wood.
And the oak sees to it that even your verses (if ever they were yours) are taken from you; for suddenly the young man stoops and picks up a twig. With his anlace he shapes and points it.
Then, notching the oak’s rough bark, in the place where once a twist of red-gold hair hung, he pins his paper to the bough.
3
After that the oak grew to be so old that, merely because it had lived so long, nobody would have thought of cutting it down. Instead, with wooden props, they shored up two of its arms, so that it resembled Moses when he would see the battle to the end. And still that something, that early thing, that was neither a wisp of hair nor the verses of a dreaming boy, persisted mysteriously about it. On the hillside there now stood a gabled house, built of the stones of the old castle. Of the castle itself only a few butts of old masonry remained, with grasses seeded in the chinks and wild flowers in the crannies.
Then one day, not very long ago, the oak fell. A December tempest brought it down, and it lay there among the broken upstart saplings, epic in its ruin, hollow as an old skull, grey with lichen and the wintry rime, bearded like a Druid with the pale mistletoe, its ancient arms tossed up in agony to the skies.
On the morning of a Christmas Eve a young man and a young woman stood together beside the dying tree. They had come up into the wood to gather holly and mistletoe for the decoration of the gabled house – that is to say, the young woman had come for that purpose. The young man was there because she was there, and he rather thought that had she come on the morning of Christmas Eve for mushrooms or plover’s-eggs he would have been there just the same.
But whether or not he wanted to marry the girl he could not for the life of him have told.
Her name was Bronwen, which, in the country that had cradled her and her foebears, means ‘white breast’; and the hair that showed under her knitted cap of white wool was a splendour of raw red gold. A few strands of it stirred about the white muffler she had carelessly cast about her throat, and the brows above her pale eyes were of whitey-gold. She wore a jazz blouse of little red and white flames with freakings of black in between, and the boots under her short tweed skirt were laced high, and were the same boots in which she had driven a three-ton W. D. Berna lorry.
And she would have married him any hour of the day he had asked her.
If one could judge by his few mumbled words, the young man appeared to be wondering how the fallen tree was to be disposed of. But his eyes were as often on the girl as on the tree. They were quiet, rather anxious grey eves, as if he really did not know what to do for the best. He wore an old tweed shooting-jacket, so old that it had had to be reinforced with leather at the wrists; but his breeches and puttees and the collar at his neck were of khaki, and he tapped his thick-rubber-clumped boots with his cane from time to time.
‘Wouldn’t be easy to get at it with a crosscut,’ he muttered. ‘And it’s hardly worth burning, anyway. Drill it and stick a primer or two in –’
The girl scarcely heard him, for her thoughts were quite otherwhere. She had known the oak all her life. It had been her mother’s favourite sitting-place, and, when it had grown insecure, it had been at her mother’s request that the props had been placed under its failing limbs. Bronwen remembered her mother quite well; she even remembered rolling, as a mere baby, on the shabby old manoeuvre-rug that had been spread under the oak. Later, when she had begun to read her fairy-books, she had crept into the tree’s cavernous hollow, and had pretended to herself that she lived there and was a dryad. She had always felt that she had some special understanding of what a dryad was. Where she had this conviction from she could not have told.
And now the tree was as good as dead. Too bad that trees had to die like that! Why, they said it was more than a thousand years old! A thousand years! All sorts of dead-and-gone people must have sat under it, and met their best boys there, and quarrelled and kissed and had the time of their lives under its poor old boughs! Really she couldn’t help feeling a bit mopey about it. It had been such a pal of an oak. And now it had gone west.
As the driver of a three-ton lorry she would have kept her mouth shut about the oak. As the owner of that hair and of the ancient name that meant ‘white breast’ she still held her tongue about it. But for all that she had a feeling that she was losing part of herself.
‘Anyway your father won’t let it lie here,’ the young man’s voice came as if from a distance. ‘Breeds more pests than all the others put together –’
Because his talk of pests and crosscuts and primers jarred on her a little, abruptly she bestirred herself.
‘Well, let’s do something. The car’ll be round to take us to the Proberts’ at three, and half the decorations ought to be up by then. You’ve got the thickest gloves. Will you get the holly if I’ll get the mistletoe?’
She cast aside her throat-wrap, scrambled up on to the giant trunk, and began to make her way towards one hoary limb.
The young man watched her. He was still unable to decide what was the best course for her, the best course for him. Girls were the devil of a problem nowadays. Sometimes they scared him half out of his wits with their new crude logic, or what they called their logic. He didn’t know that he called it logic at all. Much of it sounded to him like a pert and unfounded tu quoque, as if a man’s meat were never by any chance a woman’s poison. But it came to much the same thing in the end whatever you called it, and he wasn’t sure it was good enough to risk marriage on. Not that Bronnie was one of the worst specimens, of course; there were times when he found her quite reasonable. He didn’t suppose she would take it as a sex-challenge if he ventured to ask her whether she would mind being married in a church. She might not object to the word ‘obey’ or to a wedding-ring. But for all that she sometimes had extraordinarily decided views on things. Picked ’em up in the Waacs, he expected. He hadn’t wanted her to go into the Waacs. He would have preferred to keep women and war entirely apart. It might have helped the country, but he couldn’t see that it had done the girls themselves much good. It had unsettled them, put half-baked ideas into their heads, till they knew what they didn’t want, but hadn’t much idea of what they did want. And he liked to look up to his women-folk – you know – to keep them a bit apart. What did they want anyway – to be dragged away by the hair, or knocked over the head with a stone?
But he shook off his thoughts. Whatever else she was she made a perfectly topping picture as she stood up there, hanging on to
the oak.
Well might he admire. She stood in a forked crutch some seven or eight feet from the ground, and the wintry sun made of the dark ivy and the rimy boughs, the jazz-bloused girl and the myriad intricate shadows of limb on limb, a miraculous dapple of pale colour. By Jove, if he could only have been an artist and painted that! But no artist could have got that burning gold of her hair against the thick creamy white of her nape. Whether he ever married her or not, he would always see her like that – all in the picture, so to speak, perched up in the oak as if she was part of it, for all the world as if she lived there. That was something to have seen anyway . . .
And, having seen it, he turned away in search of holly.
But he had not taken a dozen steps before he heard the sound of a breaking branch, and a thud and a short stifled cry. In an instant he was at her side again.
‘What’s the matter, Bronnie? . . . Oh, Lord! Are you hurt?’
His eyes went upwards to the branch from which she had slipped. She hardly seemed to know whether she was hurt or not, she trembled so, and he was unaware that for the moment he had her almost in his arms. His hand, supporting her, encountered something cool and soft and firm.
It was her arm, naked from finger nails to shoulder.
On the arm itself there was not a scratch, but the whole of the jazz sleeve fluttered from the bough overhead, ripped clean out from the shoulder as she had sought to save herself.
And suddenly he knew what to do now, as he held her a little way from him and drew a deep breath. He stared at the lovely white thing that clung to his shoulder. Bronwen, his lodas goch! He had never dreamed of such loveliness There could hardly be another arm like it in the world, unless it were its fellow, to put round him! Doubts? Questions? Woman old and woman new? A man can but venture – it was always so –
The next moment she was at arm’s length no longer, but crushed, that lovely whiteness and all, against his breast.
‘Bronnie!’ he cried, laughing, and looked into her eyes.
The Dead of Night Page 52