C herry Orchard was for sale. The impossible thing, the thing that had yet threatened them always out of the misty future, had become fact. She could not believe it. She crouched under the lee of the sandstone wall of the garden, where the sun shone, for the spring wind was sharp and eager, and the slow, grinding poverty of years had worn all the wool out of her clothing. The beautiful old timbered house where she and her invalid father lived had consumed their small income as long as Laura could remember. She kept the place neat with her own hands, toiling in the vast, bare kitchen and in the wild, half-abandoned garden.
“I’d as lief,” she muttered, “think of selling myself.”
The dark shadows under her eyes grew darker as a flush ran from chin to forehead, for she remembered—and would remember till the end of her life—the things Julius Winter had said to her yesterday.
Julius Winter was the new owner of Bitterne Hall. He had brought with him a wife almost as rich as himself, a Lady in her own right, and exactly like a pink sweet. Before Julius shone a vista of pleasant days with many smaller pink sweets about him.
Yesterday he had come with Lady Angela to return her timid call—timid, because she never quite knew whether she was technically a “lady” or not; whether she would be snubbed or not.
They had tea out of the depleted seaweed tea-set in the room that was so low and hollow-sounding, full of green light from the laurel outside the western window.
Lady Angela was tired.
“Laura, my dear,” said her father in his sad, disillusioned voice, which had faded since the advertisement of Cherry Orchard appeared, “please show our guest the orchard.”
They went out through the French window, past the laurel that lifted its ancient, snakily twisted trunk almost to the casement window above, which was hers.
“This is my name-tree,” she said. “Do you know the old belief about name-trees? If the tree dies, you die. If you sicken, the tree withers. If you desert it, a curse falls.”
“I can believe it, here.”
They came to the orchard. Roofed with pale ivory, heady with the thin, pure perfume of the cherry-blossom and of the cowslips in the dew-grey grass beneath, walled with apple-green to the east, where the tall hawthorn hedge had burst into leaf, and with black-green to the north, where a plantation of fir-trees held up white candles, the place lay wrapped in spells, dreaming its own dream.
It was the intolerable sweetness of it, of the sharp smell of crushed nettles, of the white cherry petals that wandered down the stirless air like tears, of the soft, pale cowslip calyxes, that shook her fortitude.
Beneath his questions, his instant perception, she sobbed helplessly, while his mocking, absorbed eyes dwelt upon her tear-blotted face.
“A cherry-flower in the rain,” he thought.
“Such passion for a place,” he said, “is absurd.”
“Why?”
“Your love should be given to a man. Such passion as yours should bear fruit.”
She was silent.
“Is it race-memory? Because your ancestors loved it?”
“Maybe; but it goes further back than that.”
“Love of beauty?”
“No. I love the ugly things as much as the others. I’m as fond of the nettles as of the cowslips.”
“What is it, then?”
“It is that I’ve got roots here—the roots of my name-tree, and they go so deep. Did you hear this song, ever?”
She was born and bred with the birds.
Their words were her words.
For she was come out of the earth and water;
From lily leaf and ash bole.
She said, “I am the moaning forest’s daughter,
A tree hath my soul.”
She slipped away between sunset and moonrise,
Between town hall and steeple,
Back to her own people.
Who knows where she wanders, where she lies?
She gleamed on him, and the light in her face astonished him. He had quite discarded the idea that she was posing. Lady Angela posed about the beauty of nature: but this woman was incapable of it. She had real, vital, savage passion in her fragile body. He had not thought passion of just that quality existed in the modern world. Certainly the women he had known had not possessed it. This woman had it, and she wasted it on a place. He watched her, standing slim and gauche in her old brown dress, her soul tormented by love for something vague and mysterious, something he could not touch or name, that seemed to lie beneath the earthly beauty that she saw, like a dreaming god. Desire surged over him—the poignant longing that jonquils bring, the longing to touch the silken petals, to gather the brittle, faintly-scented stalks.
To possess this woman would be to ravish a forest.
Because he did not dare to touch her, he gathered a cowslip and ran his strong, dark fingers up and down its soft keys, bruising, breaking.
“Keys of Heaven,” she said. “Every year I’ve watched them, from the first leaves, when the rooks were so loud in the March evenings, till the dry fruit.”
“Would you like to keep Cherry Orchard for ever?”
She looked at him, frowning.
“I will buy Cherry Orchard and give it to you, if you will give me the keys of heaven.”
“And heaven is—?”
“Your love.”
The blossomy shadows lengthened. Somewhere in the elms beyond the orchard a pigeon moaned. Spiders went stealthily about their weaving, and the dew came with no sound upon leaf and flower. Still she was mute. It was as if the orchard expressed her mind. The dew fell. The dove mourned. The shadows lengthened.
“I have no love to give,” she said at last, “to you or any man.”
“Before the fruit falls in your orchard,” he said, harsh and low, “you shall give it to me.”
He cast one long look round the shadowy place. It was as if he gathered every tree into his arms.
She turned to the gate. This strange silence, full of the muttering of presage, terrified her.
They went back to the house, passing the old laurel.
“Your name-tree,” he said. He tore off a bunch of leaves in each hand, pressing them to his lips.
“Ah, you have hurt it! The curse will fall.”
He looked at her with the slow, ironical smile that Lady Angela dreaded. Then he held open the window for her to enter. And while his host made dignified protest against life and circumstance, the eyes of Julius brooded upon Laura, and saw in her lap the vision of a child—not a child like a sweet, but one compact of earth and dew, a child like a cherry flower. Before the fruit was set, Julius Winter began negotiations about the house. When the last faded cowslips were merged in the growing grass, he had bought it. Cherry Orchard, with its murmurs, its shadows, and its silences, was his.
Lady Angela, puzzled by this whim, said:
“It will do for Arthur.”
Arthur was their eldest.
Julius smiled. Then he laughed. There was something in his wife’s remark that grew more amusing as he considered it. He could not imagine Arthur’s small, round, complete entity presiding over that brooding place—that place where mists lingered and melodies sounded, and man wrestled with the spirit of earth.
“Arthur shall have it,” he said, “if he can get it.”
“You mean, if you give it to him.”
“I can’t give it to him.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know why.”
“You are getting very strange in your manner, Julius. I believe it is that house. They tell me it is haunted.”
“Oh, it’s haunted, I can vouch for that.”
At Cherry Orchard the old man said:
“It is the best that could have happened.”
“The best? Oh, you think it is the best?”
“The very best.”
She laughed; and her laughter, sad and wild as a frantic, imprisoned bird, beat on the rafters.
“You are very strange, my dear,” said her father.
When the rounded fruit softly acquiesced to ripeness, gathering gold and red in the midday sunshine; when the hay was cut and the long evenings thrilled with the singing of the swallows, Julius came every day, and the old man rejoiced to see his home being made so trim and weatherproof. Joy revived him, so that the illness which had held him loosened its grip. His voice lost its plaintive note.
“It is just as good as if it were my own again,” he said, “with such a landlord.”
“With such a landlord!”
Her voice was full of little darts of fear and curiosity and scorn, that ran like lizards in and out of the words.
He came. As usual, they walked in the orchard after tea.
“The fruit is nearly ripe,” he said.
“Not yet.”
The trees brooded over them like jewelled birds in some ancient tapestry. They filled him with an ache of longing. He wanted to possess them, as a god might. He would possess them in her. His soul could only reach the outer fringes of hers; his voice strove to win her; his eyes burnt on hers, but she lowered her lashes and was mute. She remained aloof: but through the body he would reach her. She should have nothing of herself left, no corner of her spirit that was not his.
“I’ll come for your answer this day next week, Laura. If it’s no, you and your father will go at once.”
“And not see summer out?”
“And not see summer out.”
In one long, lingering look he took her face to himself, line by line, curve by curve.
“If it’s yes—I know your window.”
So wild a gust of passion shook him that he left the place without another word, and came no more until the week was over.
“I’m glad you’ve finished at Cherry Orchard,” said Lady Angela, “I’m sure the place is haunted. Still, perhaps it will do for Arthur.”
Moonlight was wan over Cherry Orchard, and the fruit shone, darkly polished, amid the soft, lulled leaves. The trees stood mute, quiescent in the pale light, and the laurel gave no faintest whisper as Julius and Laura passed it.
Once more they came to the orchard. Once more they stood beneath the great Morello tree.
“Ripe,” he said; “Laura! Laura!”
She was silent. But a faint breeze, walking in the tree-tops, seemed to him to be her murmur of assent.
Only the sheer crudity of his desire for her, the strange universality of the mating he had willed, gave him courage to brave her white silence.
“Tonight?” he said. “Laura!”
Once again there fell from the tree-tops a vague, assenting murmur.
Laura wondered at her father, sitting in the western window, brisk and happy over his letters.
“I shall go to bed now, dear,” he said. “But I had to write about the fruit. It is ripe.”
“Dead ripe,” said Laura.
She stood in the shadow of the laurel, and the large, oval leaves seemed to be fingering her face.
She leaned from her window and saw the orchard huddled beyond its hedges like a flock at bay; saw the gables on the grass, and the ancient twisted trunk of the laurel climbing towards her window. In the faint airs the ivy breathed on the house like a living creature. In a meadow by the high road a corncrake, startled by some late traveller, set up its harsh crying.
Dawn, faintly reflected in the west, flowered in pale green and white, like an April orchard. Julius awoke. He wanted to shout in his ecstasy. He had imposed his being upon the white evanescence of a cherry flower. He had ravished the forest. Children minded like the forest should be his.
“Laura!” he whispered, “I broke that old tree, I’m afraid; but Cherry Orchard is yours for ever.”
He stooped to kiss her, but she was dead.