Will lay in his deck-chair, “floated” by rugs and cushions from the deft hands of Mrs. Armstrong, and looked at the elm-tree.
Was there anything in the world as lovely as a tree? A yacht in full sail? A woman walking down the world? The silence of a mountain? A symphony? A host of golden daffodils? The essence of Leonardo’s mind smiling through paint?…
Lovely was the wrong adjective, but it served, for it had something in it of light and grace.…
And a tree was grace and ease, deep-rooted, deep- and wide-rooted in the earth, the black earth, under the vivid grass, and wide-branched above the earth, under the sky. It gave a voice to the invisible wind from regions behind the world, from desolate sea inlets, from prairies awaiting in grey silver the rising of the sun, from wastes of seas that know no land horizons, from the down-rush of mountains, from beleaguered cities, from battlefields, from the back courts of tenements where it whirled the children’s pagan fires.…
There in the branches it sighed more gently than any woman’s mouth; or shrieked in the night like all the lost souls in hell.
But now—the calm, the dignity, the poise, that incomparable effect of ease, of breadth, of balance. In the gloaming its myriad twigs and branches, gone black, were a necromantic etching against the sky. In the sunlight they lifted the light up, lifted it up on the air, as they lifted the singing of birds.
Wise and ancient and wrinkled, with a listening silence, like the silence in the heart of a harp—ah, more than that.…
The twigs bowed and rose again.…
Dear lovely elm-tree!
This was the time of convalescence, when he should outdo the poets! And the poets were right; not the poets who thought, but the poets who, having thought, listened.
This, this was at the back of everything.
He had tried to make Joe understand something of this on the way hither. He had insisted on dismissing the taxi at the spot where he had seen the wild geese, and there had told Joe smilingly of the incident of the geese, had explained to him how he believed that the incident had saved his life. “You know how difficult it is to kill a cat or a weasel. Have you ever tried to drown kittens?” Joe hadn’t. “Well, you’ve got to drown them a very long time. Once, as a boy, I helped at the drowning. It was in the country. We put them in a pail of water. You have to keep poking them down. At last we held them down with our hands. I hated doing it. So I made sure that there wasn’t a single move left in them. I wanted them to be drowned utterly. Well, when it was all over we poured them out on the refuse heap. I wanted to bury them, but that was voted soft. An hour later I sneaked round to see them—and there was one, with its blind head, moving…I was that kitten, and the impulse to move was provided by the wild geese.”
Joe’s eyes grew thoughtful.
Then Will told him, as they walked down to the farm, about the incident of the bird-singing in the dawn. He told it with the air of one telling an amusing fairy story, otherwise Joe might be embarrassed. And even as it was, Joe said little.
“An odd delusion, wasn’t it?” Will remarked.
“It was,” said Joe.
Will laughed, and explained to Joe why he laughed, slyly pulling Joe’s leg.
“You mistrust anything in the nature of the mystical! Anything that savours of the irrational, the religious, you at once are up against. You see it as the insidious enemy, the social dope?”
“Don’t you think there’s reason?” asked Joe.
“Of course! Yes!” But Will’s laugh was full of gaiety.
He had tried to tell Joe that an experience of that sort did not make a man an apostle of its theory or creed or philosophy; what it did was to bring him into harmony with himself, to integrate him, and so make him a stronger force than ever for—well, for the help, say, he would now give to Joe.
But Joe was not too sure. Yet he was troubled also.
As if there was something that Joe had denied himself, a memory of an old childish indulgence, a private weakness not for the grim world of modern social relations!
It was going to require courage to be gay! Easy enough to be gay in company, laughing and drinking to all hours, in a positive orgy of escape. Escape from what? From oneself, of course. But it was another matter being gay in oneself. To look at a bunch of grass, a tree, the sky, to feel the wind, the rain, the light…ah, light, not only outside, in the air, on the body, but inside, behind the mind…to see, to feel, in the final core of oneself, and so to be whole—and therefore all the more game to break the fell clutch of circumstance, individual or social!
Hail, Felicity! Philip had told him she had very nearly chucked up her Paris job when she had learned the full details of his misadventures. In a long letter she had rallied him, asked him a score of questions, and begged him to come and see her. It was a thought! Why not? His convalescence would certainly run to three weeks. His eyelids quivered in a primordial humour. And this sun did stir the sluggish blood with snake-like thrills!
A voice called inside the house. The voice of Jenny. She had arrived!
Will’s head fell back and he breathed heavily. It was going to take him a little while to get all his pith back.
Presently she appeared at the inner end of the house on the way to the garden, raised her hand in greeting, hesitated a moment, and then came walking along the grass towards him.
“Please!” she exclaimed, stopping him from getting up. “I’m just going into the garden. Mrs. Armstrong says you are getting on?”
They were now on easy speaking terms. Yet when she smiled, there was still that calm reserve of the features, mixture of reserve and wonder, that had affected him from the very beginning. She could look at a flower as if she were seeing it for the first time, he thought.
“You were longing to get at the garden?”
“I was,” she confessed.
“It’s a great hobby.”
“Hobby?” She opened her eyes in a half-startled expression, half-assumed. Then she smiled as he smiled.
The trouble about her smile to Will, who was in a rather weak and therefore more readily excitable condition, was its contrast to her gravity. He withdrew his eyes.
He watched her move about the garden for a time and then closed his eyes. There was all this afternoon. But to-morrow, Sunday, Philip was coming, and perhaps some of the boys from the office.
He listened to the wind’s quiet sigh in the elm; felt the sun; and slowly his mind lifted and floated. Delicious feeling. He was learning the trick of it all right! Nothing would ever deny it to him again. It was pagan and primordial. Or were these just words—for the earth-old inner rhythm of life itself?
Mrs. Armstrong brought out his tea-tray. “It’s a poor old bachelor,” he said, “who has to feed by himself.”
She laughed and brought out a tray for Jenny and called her from the garden. “I have to see the grieve,” Will heard her shout. “You can pour the tea.”
And Jenny came and poured the tea, sitting on a rug in a friendly way.
“This is very kind of you,” Will acknowledged. “If I move too suddenly I still feel some of my bruises.”
She looked at him with troubled eyebrows, the clarity of her eyes hurt a little.
“Would you like to hear the real story?” he asked with quiet humour.
“I would,” she said naturally.
“I don’t know if you know much about our slum regions? It’s a long story. If I’m going to make it intelligible I’ll have to tell you about Joe, and socialism, and Jamie Melvin, and his wife Ettie who died in childbirth, and Ivy, and that last strange night—when a bruiser and myself fought on the street and I was knocked down and trampled upon and successfully robbed. You wouldn’t understand it otherwise; and I’m afraid it’s too long a story.”
“No, I should like to hear it, but—just as you like.”
“I should like, frankly, to tell it to you,” said Will simply.
“Please do, then.”
He told it calmly, describing the characters and the places and the incidents with an interest that now and then drew her into the recital by such indirect questions as “But perhaps you don’t know that…?” until the whole thing lived for her. His description of his meeting with Ivy had a cool detachment that made it very real.
“I don’t regret any of it,” he concluded. “I blame no one—hardly even myself—for what happened to me. And I am very glad of one thing—that Jamie came to see me just before I left the infirmary. He had been greatly struck apparently by the way I did not hit back at him and yet let out at the boxer! Of course Joe told him a few things, too. He was also on edge that night, poor devil, because he knew that the decision about his compensation was just about due.”
“Did he get it?”
“Yes. About thirty shillings a week. Mary and he are hitting it off quite well, Joe says, and he’s on the lookout for any sort of light job.”
“Must be dreadful—living down there in the slums.”
“No earth, no flowers…?” Will smiled. “But it’s not really as bad as it sounds to us or as it is written about. Their reactions are not our reactions. Your garden here would bore them stiff. And the overwhelming mass of them are extraordinarily decent; the women caring for their room and kitchen, or even single end, their home, keeping it clean and tidy, concerned about the menfolk and children, putting up a magnificently stoic fight against a real or ever-threatening economic famine that is hellish because it shouldn’t be. It’s that awful greyness, gloom, that got me. Their lives are not dramatic. They are grey. But they don’t feel that greyness as we would. To them the street noises and the grinding trams are their singingbirds. Well, all right. But for God’s sake, keep them from fear, fear of want; let us—oh!” Will dropped his head back.
“I am glad you spoke to me like this,” said Jenny quietly.
Will lifted his head and shook it with a wry smile. “I did not tell it to you for nothing. You see, I feel guilty about having intruded on you personally.”
“Please, let us forget that.”
“It’s not that: it’s this. Philip Manson and I are old schoolboy friends. He wanted to come and see me to-morrow. How could I keep him back? I have never told him, of course, that you were here. I have always respected your—your obvious desire to have some corner all your own. Oh, I know. Please understand me. And perhaps”, concluded Will, who had not looked at Jenny, “he will bring my aunt.”
Upon his ears came a small, suppressed, and infectious laugh. It startled him like a blow, and he glanced at Jenny with an astonishment that in a moment became confused.
“It was—the lugubrious way—you mentioned your aunt,” she tried to explain, trembling on the verge of complete laughter.
Will looked away. “Oh Lord, that’s divine of you,” he murmured, tremendously excited, because in the instant he saw what she would be like when she came from behind her reserve and spilled over in golden fun. Primavera might be solemn in the picture, but once on her toes in the wind.…
They were both awkward for a little, a trifle nervous, and suddenly Jenny asked solemnly:
“Why do you think I should mind about Philip Manson so much?”
Will gathered all his resources and looked at her. “Don’t you?”
“Well,” she said, “I certainly like him very much.”
Will glanced away and wet his lips with his tongue.
“What have you on your mind?” she asked.
“That would be personal!”
“You have been very personal to me about yourself—in that story. That was nice of you. I liked your frankness.”
“And you would be frank in return?”
She looked away. “Yes.”
They were silent. At last he said: “He’s coming about three to-morrow. If you’re not in, I shan’t mention that you’re here.”
She turned her eyes on him, and, with that curious expression of troubled hurt, they accused him of being trivially evasive, of not saying what was really in his mind.
“How can I say it?” he asked.
“Is it about——” she paused.
“That week-end? Yes.”
“Did Philip tell you?”
“Oh no! Philip would never tell.”
“Who told you?”
“No one. I just—knew.”
She removed her eyes from his face and looked into the distance. “I felt that you knew,” she said.
“You didn’t go?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I—it was dreadful.”
“Was it?”
“Yes. I found I didn’t want to go—and felt horrible about it, and mean.”
He looked at her. “Why didn’t you want to go?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“Did you hate yourself for not going? Did you cry out inside yourself: ‘I must go! I must go!’ and yet could not drag your feet to go?”
Her eyes came full upon him. “Why couldn’t I go?”
“It’s difficult. It goes pretty deep, I think.”
She was now all alive, sitting perfectly erect, her startled yet calm head rising up out of the earth.
The gate from the steading clicked and Mrs. Armstrong cried to them cheerfully as she approached.
Will lay in bed watching the shadows of the twigs of the elm-tree floating on the blind, and, thinking of last night, floated with them, and beyond them.
Jenny had said it would be a sunny morning, because of the slight touch of frost as they came down through the twilight and the red haze on the horizon. It was the most magical walk he had ever had. They were extremely friendly and full of quick laughing talk, but still shy and reserved. They did not carry on the conversation interrupted by Mrs. Armstrong. They made no effort to “explain” anything. There had been the living moment, each sensitively aware of the other, of bird-singing, the darkening trees, each finding out about the other in a thousand impersonal personal ways, and Jenny—he could see it in her—frightened that he might come too close too soon.
But he hadn’t—not with the whole summer ahead! At thought of the whole summer, the weeks and the months, the early birches, the warmth in the earth, the uplands, the June nights, the long enchanted June nights, his mind swooned away under the sun, carrying the June twilight of its thought with it, wherein Jenny walked bareheaded.
He was still a bit weak probably! Silently he laughed and looked with slanting eyes at the shadows on the blind.
What a change had come upon his spirit since he had come to this farm! Yet all that had happened had really been the simplest thing in the world. By a lucky chance, he had broken through the integument of fear and hatred and grey concern that wrap the daily life around, and risen above it. There was nothing mysterious at all in the performance, though the effect was magical. Any simple person lying on his back in the sun, with closed eyes, listening to the wind in a tree or the sea on a shore, would experience the effect to a certain degree. And any one who has so experienced it for a moment opens his eyes with a smile, a smile of goodness and beneficence, and an inclination to hum with wind or sea.
After that, thought Will, it is entirely a matter of degree. Personal trouble or social tragedy may supervene…but always cunningly at the back of the mind will be the memory of the release, like an effect of light.
And what works for the individual must also work—let it come!—for humanity.
Noble thought! It charged Will with happy laughter. Most of the solemnity and ideals that infect the world should be stuffed into a bag and drowned in mid-Atlantic!
Oh Lord, was Jenny never going to get up? Was she lying awake thinking—what? He could see her grave face turned towards the window, the eyes brimming with light. There was a picture for a poor fellow! He groaned—and came alive like a squirrel as her door opened and closed.
He leapt out of bed, and then sat heavily down again. The body was not quite so strong as all that yet! Its weakness was a joke. Perhaps it never had even had concussion. Defence mechanism only! You watch it! said Will. It’s as full of tricks as a bag of monkeys.
They breakfasted apart, but set off immediately afterwards on the walk which Jenny had promised to take him. But first the tour of the garden. She so loved the garden that in a moment she was all alive. And Will saw that this was something which no one could ever take from her. It was her elm-tree and her sun! And he was glad, profoundly glad, that she had something she loved, apart from himself or any one else.
“Behold the hole I made in the bishopweed!” he said ruefully.
She looked at the wreck of his labour and turned away at once.
He glanced after her and followed. “I suppose it was very wrong of me, but I didn’t——”
“I was horrid,” she interrupted him shortly.
As they were going up the farm road above the steading, he said: “I’ll tell you an odd experience I had. I was once walking along a street and I saw a girl walking in front of me with quite the most perfect figure you ever saw. So I thought to myself what a pity it is that in life you rarely see a body like that with a face to match. So I hurried up a bit and had a side glance at the face and lo! it did match. That so took my breath away that I swerved and found myself in front of a bookseller’s shop; and staring at me was a book, entitled How to Make a Rock Garden. So as I didn’t want to overtake the girl, I went in and bought the book. An odd experience, wasn’t it?”
“Very.”
“Though to give life its due, it’s full of these odd experiences. But I never had the courage to give the girl the book.”
“Why?”
“Well,” said Will, “you gave me every chance to present it to you, didn’t you?”
She stopped and looked at him with that troubling of surprise and wonder that he would never get used to. She read the truth of the story in his eyes and went on at once.
They were silent for a little time.
“It’s a very good book,” he said, in cheerful practical tones. “I have it down there. And that bank is a grand place for it. I’ll have to do a little work to toughen me up, and a little harmless weeding—if you’re sure I wouldn’t be intruding?”
She stopped abruptly. “Would you?” she asked, her face kindling. “I have longed for rock plants. Plants that come up every year. I cannot tell you about them.” She thought for a moment and then went on: “If we plan that out—I might come out one or two evenings during the week—to see how it’s going on. The bus fares would ruin me, but—I’d come.”
“Would you?”
“Yes. And we’ll have to get stones. And not ordinary stones but bits of rocks, and not just sticking them in the ground like little dogs’ graves, but making ledges of them and building them up.”
She walked away with this exciting thought until they came to the place where she had overtaken him as she came down from the wood.
“That’s the wood,” she said. “Perhaps you’ll find it a sad wood.”
“How have you found it?”
“We’ll go this way, by the small burn.… Look!”
In every nook and cranny, overhanging the water, everywhere, the two sides of the little burn were starred with primroses. “These are celandines,” she said, “Wordsworth’s flower. And that, colts-foot.” She was walking on. “This greeny-gold stuff is wood spurge. Of course, the year hasn’t started yet. But this spot is a marvel, right up to the wood. To lie here and listen to the humble-bees on a summer day, when it’s in full flower, is very pleasant. You don’t quite go to sleep, but hover about, like a bee yourself. Do you like it?”
“Yes,” he said quietly. Its intimate invisible face ran round the corner.
She walked on calmly, and he had the odd notion that the flowers did not look at her but at him, the intruder, before they turned, and went on with her. Her ankles were firm and her feet moved with a sure grace over the springy turf. With a momentary touch of panic, he saw her in sober truth as Primavera, and he stared at the curves of her body and her golden head. Then he looked down at the grass, at the primroses, with an expression arrested a little in awe.
When they had opened and shut the field gate, she told him to follow her, because for a short distance it was marshy in between the scattered trees. She went quickly from tussock to tussock and he followed. “Now it’s all right,” she said.
The ground sloped up what looked like the side of a mound, and they had to stoop under branches and dodge round bushes; but within a few yards they emerged on flat ground, on top of what seemed a great circular mound, covered deeply in yellow-green of moss and close-cropped grass. Their footfalls were so noiseless that rabbits sat up before taking to their long hind legs. “Look!” she whispered, and pointed with her eyes to a rabbit couched under the root of a juniper bush a couple of paces to his right. It obviously had been surprised too late and decided to risk lying still. Round eyes, flattened ears, and sensitive nostrils. He followed Jenny at once. But there was a quick beat in his heart now, and looking up he saw the sunlight arrested in this still place. And the trees—had he ever seen that exquisite brown of larches before the delicate green needles come? But what was this? Each larch seemed lit with little upright red globes. He rubbed his eyes, but they did not vanish. He went forward and gazed at the fairy-like lights, at the tender deep red cone flowers. Slowly he looked about him, in the hushed warmth, and softly began to laugh, his eyes alert and his ears. Then he remembered Jenny and looked at her.
She was smiling, her face full of a deeper warmth than sunlight, and an expression in her eyes friendly and tender. “I hoped you would laugh,” she said.
He glanced away from her, until the sudden tumult would subside. “So this was your test?”
“No. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. But I’m glad. I love this place.”
“You come here often?”
“Yes. Every Sunday. The sun always seems to shine on this ancient mound. No one has ever been here with me before.”
He could not look at her. Could not trust himself, did not know what to say, so he said: “You did not seem happy, coming down from the wood, that day.”
“No—because you had destroyed my happiness. You were digging in the garden. You came into the wood in my mind. I think I hated you. I was fond of Philip.”
“But what had I done?”
“Nothing. That face of yours just haunted me—like a crime.” She tried to smile. “You cannot understand how that made me ashamed of myself, how it drove me—oh, I don’t know.”
His expression quickened in humour. “Crime! It is an accepted fact that persons with a secret vice know each other when they meet. In a moment they know it, without sign or symbol, as we knew each other.” He was finding it difficult to speak. He gazed over the tops of the trees. “The wild geese are nesting in the far north.” But his effort at a smile ran cold upon his face. He looked at her and found she was trembling, as he was himself. They came to each other swiftly, and clung strongly together, to keep their parts from flying adrift.
The shadow of a pigeon sped swiftly over the grass. A pair of chaffinches flirted through the air. Bird-notes warbled down through the branches that carried their tiny deep red cones and pin-points of green. Up from the valley fields came the crying of a colony of gulls. Far into the moor above, a cock grouse crew.
The mound lay with its back in the sun, full of silence, of the past, of sleepy memories of strange rites being dreamed into the present, into the future. A rabbit appeared from behind a juniper bush and, seeing them, sat up on its hind legs, its forelegs drooping against its body, its ears cocked and pink against the sun, like a rabbit in a fairy story. Everywhere the yellow-green moss was patterned with sunlight and shadow. Through a depth of tree-tops came the croodling of a pigeon: You’re too too lazy! You’re too too lazy! You!
They were sitting now a little apart, he with his legs crossed and she with her heels tucked under her. Because of the strange sweet tension in their hearts, they sat in silence, their minds and bodies open to their environment so that they seemed part of it, diffused through it.
Out of the tranced mood, he smiled and said: “This is an illustration of a theory of mine. At that moment when you are most intensely yourself, you are also most intensely part of everything else—even of some one else.” He gave her a sly look. But she did not respond nor yet withdraw her eyes. An amber cup brimful and still. She had the intuition to wait for his deeper meaning. And he suddenly said sharply: “Oh Lord, Jenny, don’t look at me like that or I’m lost!” He turned his head away and the rabbit hopped a few steps and sat up again. “So let us talk. How often we’ll have to talk!” His voice quivered with mirth. “Are you looking forward to it?”
She nodded, and her smile, deep and glimmering, came outward upon her face.
“Jenny, you are very very lovely,” he said quietly.
“I’m waiting!” she replied.
“I think you’ve been waiting since time began. And—you’ll be waiting on some such mound till time is dead.” His head moved in restless humour. “Were you conscious of waiting?”
She sat quite still, looking away. “Yes,” she said at last. “And yet I don’t know,” she added. “Or—at least—I know only now.”
“That’s a lovely one,” he murmured.
But she did not let the remark disturb her. “I loved being here alone. There were moments—sheer lovely moments—I did not want any one. The green coming on the grass, on the trees. And the sun. Then, too, down in the garden. Sometimes, in the office, when things were difficult, I could, away at the back of my mind, walk into the garden and look at a primula. I could—get its scent. It—I don’t know, I can’t tell you.”
He sat looking down at his hands, silent.
“I’m sorry”, she said, “that I was rude to you, but you came—well——”
“The serpent into the garden, the insinuating city serpent.”
She nodded. “It was even worse than that. That I might have managed. But your face, against the trees, that first time I saw you: you looked round—I’m not good at explaining—but there was something about that moment that was uncanny. It was as if I had seen your face before in some other land or in a dream—all of a sudden, before I could think, like a heart-beat. I saw at once it was nonsense. I banished you. I laughed calmly at myself. But there were moments when you persisted in coming back, that I hated you. Nothing like it had ever happened to me before. Young girls may fancy they fall in love and so on, but—nothing ever like that. I wasn’t curious or interested—I think I was afraid—perhaps, too, because of other things that were happening to me. Let me confess one silly thing. I saw you more often than you are aware! I was trying to see you look ordinary and commonplace. And twice—twice—I thought I did. I was glad. And then, one day in the office, when my mind was all in a tumult—you looked at me from the edge of your wood. It was terrible, as if you’d stung me. And it was, oh, it was humiliating!”
“The day you came down the ward, you didn’t sting me: you stabbed me with a knife. Think of the utter humiliation of fainting!” They were both smiling, their fingers plucking about the moss. “You came down the ward like Primavera, calm, with the sun in your yellow hair and birds about your head and daffodils in your hands. Dear God, had you no idea of the enormity of what you were doing? Had you no pity?”
“If you had known the effort it took to do that!”
He looked away. “There are five rabbits now.”
“I have counted eleven,” she said.
“Why are they not frightened of our voices?”
“Because we don’t mean them any harm.”
Her simple words made him breathe deeply, as if they had raised a small tumult of emotion.
“Do you think we’ll ever get to the end of this story?”
“I hope not,” she said.
He looked at her, but she dropped her eyes, leaving the smile on her face.
Her skin was transparent as a film of amber against light. Her eyes were wide-spaced, her brows clear and firm. The sunlight warmed itself in her hair. The stillness, the calm, that was of the essence of her personality, brimmed before him. But as he looked more closely, he saw the calm invaded by a subtle tremoring. Her hand, moving about the moss, quivered ever so slightly. The smile passed, and as she looked up, giving him frankly her eyes, he saw a troubling in their depths so lovely that it was more moving than tragedy.
“We’re late for lunch,” she said.
“I know.”
They made no effort to get up.
“There may be love at first sight and all that,” he said. “I don’t know. What I am sure of now is that between minds searching for the same thing, there is some mysterious communication. I’ll tell you about the wild geese.” And, as they sat there, he quietly told her the story.
It interested her very deeply.
“It’s like a fairy-tale,” she said.
He laughed. “Not quite true! And it isn’t—quite true.”
She regarded him.
“I mean, you can’t make it quite true—in the telling.”
She nodded. “I have never been carried away like that, yet I know what you mean.”
“So you see that’s the sort of thing you walked into,” he said.
“The city girl, with her insinuating tricks!”
“I called you that at least. You and your flowers! Spring! I scoffed at you. I never hated you. You didn’t interfere with my mind enough for that. I didn’t even own you in any interesting way to my mind. You had entered it and gone out of sight in it. I shrugged. Hmf! Who are you? Yet the sight of you coming down the ward.… And it was enormously complicated by the wild geese, by that queer preoccupation with light. More than that. May I tell you?”
“Please.”
He stirred restlessly. She heard the excitement in his voice as it tried to retain its ease. “There is much to tell you. You are like some one who has been a long time away. And it’s the queer stuff. But it’s very real, Jenny. (I love your name!) It’s as real as the slums. It’s more real than the slums in a way.” His fingers began plucking the grass. His words were light, like froth playing about, half-veiling, this new incredible reality of the nearness and relationship of their two solid bodies. “It’s a long difficult subject and has to do with society and socialism and freedom, all the things that are going to be intensely important to the folk of our generation, things we may have to fight for.” He gave her a sidelong smile. “You see, they are making all sorts of mechanical theories about the individual, about human nature. The individual is nothing without society, we know. That is the mechanism. But the creative spirit—it is a personal thing, and I have the idea that it comes only out of love and tenderness.” He regarded the moss in his hand for a moment. “When you’ve been wandering through the shadows, the grim facts that seem to have no purpose, and then hit on that truth; when you know in yourself that it’s as true as anything in science; then—you have a sudden feeling of freedom and happiness. You begin to see things in its light. But I’m not really explaining anything. I’m just talking to pass the time!”
She did not speak for a little. “There are meanings I do not quite follow. But—I’m glad you spoke like that. And—I’ll understand yet.”
With a slow dawning conviction, he said: “Jenny, you will!”
She gave him a shy flash of his own humour. “You sound like one for whom life is only beginning.”
“It is,” he said. “And you?”
She could not speak. Looking at her, he was drawn into a swift movement that scattered the rabbits; but a few of them stopped to sit up; whereupon, seeing no further cause for alarm, they went on eating.