PART ONE (continued 4)

“Yes,” said Lovel, “and the windows are open down to the floor, and the moths and cockchafters fly in from the garden towards the lamps, and you let your stitching fall into your lap while you watch them.”

Clare was utterly startled.

“How do you know?” she murmured.

“Oh, I know,” he replied. His vision of the room, and of the three, was so sifted and precise. “Sometimes you sing?” he prompted her.

“Mr. Calladine leans over the piano, when I sing,” she said, looking at him big-eyed.

“That frightens you?” he said, more as a statement than as a question.

“A little,” she said, telling him what she had thought she could never tell to a soul. “He seems so soft, and yet so hungry.” Her voice sank.

Lovel understood; he nodded.

“If he would sit away in the corner,” continued Clare, “I should not be afraid of him. It is his leaning over me like that. It makes me look at him all the while I sing. But he likes my singing; he asks me to do it, and he will not let me refuse.”

“And sometimes you walk in the garden,” he said, still in the same voice, as though he were looking at a tiny picture seen down the end of a long vista; “does he frighten you then?”

“Less out of doors; less when we are not shut in. I avoid the trees; being under them is more like having a ceiling over our heads. I keep to the lawn.—He is more in his place, within doors,” she said, making a discovery which answered many of her problems.

“Lamplight suits him,” said Lovel, his perceptions very clear and malicious.

She saw Calladine leaning over the piano; she saw his greying hair and his fine hands lying loosely clasped on the ebony lid. She heard the notes under her own fingers playing a slow gavotte; it was the music he liked. She felt her eyes coming round again and again in fascination drawn towards his face. A breeze fanned her cheek; and she saw herself standing with Lovel on the earthwork, the stars above their heads, and the red glow of the dying flames deepening the shadow of his brow.

“We have always been in the open together,” she murmured involuntarily.

“I have never seen you in a room,” Lovel corroborated.

“The day that I found you on the Downs,” she said painfully, “the day when I last saw you,—you tried to hide from me among the beeches. Why was that? Did you hope that they would protect you? Did the sense of enclosure give you strength? Would the Downs have compelled you to be more honest? I believe it was that. One can lie better,—can’t one?—in a room; and as you had no room you took the shelter of the trees. You couldn’t tell me lies out on the Downs?”

“Is that why Calladine prefers a room?” he enquired.

“Mr. Calladine tells me no lies,” she said, with a small flicker of pride.

“Oh, no,” said Lovel easily; “he only tells lies to himself. Through and through. Or are they lies? Romances, perhaps. Only romances. And you are part of them. But they couldn’t thrive in sunshine.”

“We are not in sunshine now,” she said; “only in star-shine, and losing our heads a little. I am going to marry Mr. Calladine, you know, Lovel. So perhaps I should not talk about him to you as I have been talking, or ... or indulge myself in these fancies. You asked me what I had told him about yourself and me; I answered that there was nothing to tell; nor is there.”

“But if I had not gone into the beech-clump ...” began Lovel. He was suddenly Puckish, mischievous; or so she thought.

“But you did go into it!” she cried out.

“And stayed in it till you were out of sight. But Calladine,” he resumed, disregarding her effort to restore the balance of their conversation, “Calladine will get you into a room for the rest of your life. It will be a dim room, with the light shrouded from it. He will talk in it, and you will listen, and his talk will seem to you less and less unconvincing. Presently you will accept it as natural talk; you will answer in the same key. You will play sad old tunes, and Calladine will lean over the piano. But he will grow less graceful and more ungainly, and his joints will crack when he stoops over your hand to kiss it. And always you will be in the house,—in the room.”

“Lovel!” she cried.

“The dimness of the room will bleach your spirit,” he said finally and remorselessly.

What strange mood possessed him? Were the legends true? had he the gift of prophecy? His very language had a sonorous, almost a Biblical, ring. It was true that the occasion fostered it, and that he might be taken for a prophet, standing there on the elevation, ringed with darkness, and with that pool of dying fire at his feet.

“Is it kind, Lovel, is it kind to put these thoughts into my head?” she cried, distressed.

“Kind,” he said scornfully. “When did ever you want kindness from me? I haven’t given you kindness, or romance like Calladine’s. I keep kindness for Olver.”

“And for animals,” she interjected, remembering. The remembrance softened her marvellously towards him.

“And for animals. But for you....” He scanned her from head to foot, as though the term for what he had given her were inexpressible. “Not kindness for you,” he finished up.

A great uproar arose in the field below; the crowd scattered, and down the pathway thus cleft they saw, by the light of the flames, a small black shape bundling helter-skelter along, till a ring of shouting men closed round it and hid it from view.

“Rounding up the wild beasts,” said Lovel, amused. “They won’t sacrifice them on the stones,—not they. They’ll all be chivvied back into their cages after a few louts have got a nip on the ankle. I wonder how many will remain at large? All the old women of the village will be going about to-morrow with umbrellas and pokers. See, now, they are beating out the fire.”

The last sparks flew large and red in the darkness.

“Fire and wild beasts and the stones,” murmured Lovel dreamily. “How many centuries is it, do you think, since those three things have met together here? The place will get a bad name among owners of circuses. They will say that it clamours for its natural prey; that the circle is under a curse; that it scents blood; and a hundred such fabulous things.” He laughed as he spoke, but Clare, looking at him, thought that the fantastic creature half believed it himself. “What will you say, when they want to know where you have been?” he asked. “You won’t dare own up to the gipsy fellow. You’ll say you watched the fire, and let it be understood that you were alone,—isn’t that so?”

“Of course I shall say I have been with you; why not?” said Clare.

“Ah, but I’d rather you didn’t,” he said earnestly. “Keep it a secret,—that we stood and talked unseen while the rest beat the fire out down below. I had not thought that I should see you again, and now I know that I shall not see you again,—in the distance, perhaps,—and hear the bells for your wedding,—and see you driving by,—Mrs. Richard Calladine,—but I shall never stand again with you alone as in this hour. Let us keep it a secret. I don’t care what you think of me. Look, the fire has gone out now, and it is quite dark, but the time I spent with you was lit by the fire. I will walk round with you to the Manor House, and let you go.”

In silence they started off to walk round the top of the earthwork towards the Manor House. The village lay below them in its strange cup, and around outside the circle lay the Downs hunched in the starlight. Where the road intersected the circle they ran down the slope and crossed it, their footsteps briefly crunching on the gravel, but on the opposite side they scrambled up again and silenced steps on the turf and continued side by side along the high ridge above the ditch. A breeze from the Downs blew cool against their cheeks; they knew it well, it was a friend pleading with them, calling them back to the open. They both knew the Downs so well that in their consciousness they were all the time aware of the country’s geography, stretching before them like a foreshortened map; the long roads, the little English towns with their broad main-street that was only a section of the Roman highway, the ancient green tracks over the hills, and the angular spatchcock landmark of the White Horse, straddling on the hillside. Neither of them had thought sufficiently beyond these things to be tormented by the further world. But, on the other hand, they had attained a degree of familiarity and concentration undiminished by any scattering of their faculties. They had not sprinkled their interest over other lands and other folk. They had dwelt only on their country and on themselves, so that the breeze came to them direct as a messenger from the Grey Wethers lying out derelict on the hills, and the sickness of the desire of each to respond to the call found an echo in the soul of the other.

So vivid was the call, so absurd the refusal, that as they reached the point above the trees of the Manor House garden, Lovel stood still and laughed out loud.

“So you go back to rooms,” he said, and laughed again, but more bitterly. “You!” he said, charged with contempt.

They were closer in understanding than ever they had been in their lives. He began to speak low and rapidly, “Clare,” he said, “there is no more softness in you or in me than there is in this soil. There is no flabby flesh, only bone. No trappings, only the hard skeleton. We’ve pared away.... If I had not taken shelter in the beechwood,—and it was the nearest approach to shelter I could get,—I might have taken you by the hand and galloped away with you; you would have come. That would have been mad. I have got my mother and Olver, and not only that, but I’ve got their blood in me. I want to have sons, and I may not, because of that blood. That was why I said I envied Calladine having only himself to overcome, when here am I as hard as flint, who might beget sons with that soft squelch in them that has rotted Olver. A bad stock, I said to myself; be strong; let it die out. And then the irony ... well, you know nothing about that, and even that seems not to matter now. Never be surprised, now, if you hear that I have been borne a son or a daughter, only don’t judge me too harshly. But how could I have brought you to my mother and Olver? and our children, yours and mine,—how could I, Clare? What chance had I but to cease from seeing you? Oh, if it had not been for them and my blood, then there would have been the Downs for you and me, Clare. Don’t share the Downs with Calladine; he lives among them, but he isn’t strong enough to endure them. There are some countries that it takes a strong man to endure. They don’t generate strength, and they crush weakness. Calladine should have lived in towns. But now that he has got you he may be rescued.”

“You know that Mr. Calladine has not got me, and never will have me, except in name,” said Clare.

“That’s true,” replied Lovel, not disputing her statement. “Let him live with you by his side, you listening, listening patiently, for as long as he chooses to discourse, and looking at him with the eyes of a stranger. I don’t say that I envy him. (“How you despise him!” she breathed.) And yet,” he said, “don’t I envy him a little? Can I help myself? He will see you every day, he will be able to call your name through the house at any moment and hear your answer. Don’t I envy him that? Wouldn’t I change places with him for that?—But he’ll tire of you, perhaps,” he added, dropping from his sudden anguish into the old whimsicality, “tire of you even though he has never got you. No, I don’t envy him. I’ll be less lonely,” he said with a fine insolence, “than he.”

“I must go, Lovel,” cried Clare.

He stepped back from her instantly.

“Go to Calladine,—in name. Go from me,—in name,” he said, out of his torn heart. “Only go,—go,—go!” he added, turning away from her and laying his arm across his eyes.

She left him then, feeling, although he had not once touched her, as though she had slipped all on fire from his clasp, so close had been their communion in spite of their immense separation. She did not know where he would go, or how long he would remain, gazing after her, standing on the height of the circle. For her own part she ran down amongst the trees, across the lawn, and entered the study by one of the French windows, to find her father absorbed in his work, not having noticed her absence, and blissfully unaware of any excitement or of his daughter having been in the slightest degree in danger. He said, “Bless me! bless me!” several times while she flung herself with exaggerated animation into a description of the fire, and pushed his spectacles up on to his forehead, and stared at her with an absent-minded interest as though she had just come straight out of the heart of the flames. “Dear, dear, and where’s Calladine?” he said at last. “There was something very curious I’ve come across and particularly wanted to show him. It quite corroborates my ideas. I made sure he’d bring you home.” “But you don’t understand, father: the circus-tent caught fire, and we got separated.” “Of course, to be sure,” said Mr. Warrener mildly. “Well, I daresay he’ll come over to-morrow, and I can show it him then. It’ll interest you too, Clare....”

Clare lay awake for a long time. The windows of her room were open, and outside the breeze sighed, a plaintive spirit trying to get into the house. The world outside was crying to her, endeavouring to reach her, sending its gentle messengers to plead with her. The heavy-foliaged trees rustled, as it seemed, with an unwonted nearness to her window, and the room was full of the insects of the night, which as soon as she had turned out her lamp woke into life and fluttered against her cheek and thudded softly against the ceiling like small downy ghosts. A moth imprisoned beneath her hand struggled for freedom; she shook it off with a gesture between tenderness and revulsion. Several times she lit a match, and the little creatures became still, flecking the bed with their long mottled bodies and closed wings, but no sooner had darkness fallen again than they returned in greater numbers to their soft wheeling and the bruising of their voiceless plea. She lay now shivering in spite of the summer warmth, awed to her very soul by the deepened significance of night. Darkness by shutting away the visible and reassuring world opened the field to all finer perceptions, to all the mysterious relationships, to the purified intuition of essential unity. That sense,—the sense of unity, the discarding of all irrelevancies,—was an unexpressed link between herself and Lovel; she was not sure, everything else being sifted down to its last bare expression, that it was not the link. Out in the night somewhere an owl hooted, and she heard the distant baying of a dog; the spacious presence of the Downs opened out before her widened senses, their loneliness, and the secret of their ancient tombs; their untilled defiance rolling eternally under the stars. Where was Lovel now? Was he still standing like a sentinel on the dyke, between the Downs and the sleeping village, with only the vault of the black sequined sky above his head? as she fancied him there he seemed to grow in stature until in his heroic proportions he became an embodiment of that open country which called to her, and his voice rose harmoniously in a long cry above the soughing of the breeze in the trees. Or had he plunged down from the circle after she had left him, to roam across the uplands, a wisdom in his feet, a swiftness that lifted him above fatigue? That he was out somewhere in the night she was sure; no house would confine him, not even a house whose walls were built of the sarsen stones. He was out somewhere, and every moth that bruised itself so plaintively and so impotently against her was his envoy; every sound that reached her, whether the whisper of the breeze or the churning of a night-jar, bore the burden of its message from him to her. If she called back to him “Lovel! Lovel!” surely in one form or another her voice would find him among the hills.