LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

crouched down and carefully put his finger through the thorns into the round door of the nest.

      “It's almost as if you were feeling inside the live body of the bird,” he said, “it's so warm. They say a bird makes its nest round like a cup with pressing its breast on it. Then how did it make the ceiling round, I wonder?”

      The nest seemed to start into life for the two women. After that, Miriam came to see it every day. It seemed so close to her. Again, going down the hedgeside with the girl, he noticed the celandines, scalloped splashes of gold, on the side of the ditch.

      “I like them,” he said, “when their petals go flat back with the sunshine. They seemed to be pressing themselves at the sun.”

      And then the celandines ever after drew her with a little spell. Anthropomorphic as she was, she stimulated him into appreciating things thus, and then they lived for her. She seemed to need things kindling in her imagination or in her soul before she felt she had them. And she was cut off from ordinary life by her religious intensity which made the world for her either a nunnery garden or a paradise, where sin and knowledge were not, or else an ugly, cruel thing.

      So it was in this atmosphere of subtle intimacy, this meeting in their common feeling for something in Nature, that their love started.

      Personally, he was a long time before he realized her. For ten months he had to stay at home after his illness. For a while he went to Skegness with his mother, and was perfectly happy. But even from the seaside he wrote long letters to Mrs. Leivers about the shore and the sea. And he brought back his beloved sketches of the flat Lincoln coast, anxious for them to see. Almost they would interest the Leivers more than they interested his mother. It was not his art Mrs. Morel cared about; it was himself and his achievement. But Mrs. Leivers and her children were almost his disciples. They kindled him and made him glow to his work, whereas his mother's influence was to make him quietly determined, patient, dogged, unwearied.

      He soon was friends with the boys, whose rudeness was only superficial. They had all, when they could trust themselves, a strange gentleness and lovableness.

      “Will you come with me on to the fallow?” asked Edgar, rather hesitatingly.

      Paul went joyfully, and spent the afternoon helping to hoe or to single turnips with his friend. He used to lie with the three brothers in the hay piled up in the barn and tell them about Nottingham and about Jordan's. In return, they taught him to milk, and let him do little jobs—chopping hay or pulping turnips—just as much as he liked. At midsummer he worked all through hay-harvest with them, and then he loved them. The family was so cut off from the world actually. They seemed, somehow, like “les derniers fils d'une race epuisee”. Though the lads were strong and healthy, yet they had all that over-sensitiveness and hanging-back which made them so lonely, yet also such close, delicate friends once their intimacy was won. Paul loved them dearly, and they him.

      Miriam came later. But he had come into her life before she made any mark on his. One dull afternoon, when the men were on the land and the rest at school, only Miriam and her mother at home, the girl said to him, after having hesitated for some time:

      “Have you seen the swing?”

      “No,” he answered. “Where?”

      “In the cowshed,” she replied.

      She always hesitated to offer or to show him anything. Men have such different standards of worth from women, and her dear things—the valuable things to her—her brothers had so often mocked or flouted.

      “Come on, then,” he replied, jumping up.

      There were two cowsheds, one on either side of the barn. In the lower, darker shed there was standing for four cows. Hens flew scolding over the manger-wall as the youth and girl went forward for the great thick rope which hung from the beam in the darkness overhead, and was pushed back over a peg in the wall.

      “It's something like a rope!” he exclaimed appreciatively; and he sat down on it, anxious to try it. Then immediately he rose.

      “Come on, then, and have first go,” he said to the girl.

      “See,” she answered, going into the barn, “we put some bags on the seat”; and she made the swing comfortable for him. That gave her pleasure. He held the rope.

      “Come on, then,” he said to her.

      “No, I won't go first,” she answered.

      She stood aside in her still, aloof fashion.

      “Why?”

      “You go,” she pleaded.

      Almost for the first time in her life she had the pleasure of giving up to a man, of spoiling him. Paul looked at her.

      “All right,” he said, sitting down. “Mind out!”

      He set off with a spring, and in a moment was flying through the air, almost out of the door of the shed, the upper half of which was open, showing outside the drizzling rain, the filthy yard, the cattle standing disconsolate against the black cartshed, and at the back of all the grey-green wall of the wood. She stood below in her crimson tam-o'-shanter and watched. He looked down at her, and she saw his blue eyes sparkling.

      “It's a treat of a swing,” he said.

      “Yes.”

      He was swinging through the air, every bit of him swinging, like a bird that swoops for joy of movement. And he looked down at her. Her crimson cap hung over her dark curls, her beautiful warm face, so still in a kind of brooding, was lifted towards him. It was dark and rather cold in the shed. Suddenly a swallow came down from the high roof and darted out of the door.

      “I didn't know a bird was watching,” he called.

      He swung negligently. She could feel him falling and lifting through the air, as if he were lying on some force.

      “Now I'll die,” he said, in a detached, dreamy voice, as though he were the dying motion of the swing. She watched him, fascinated. Suddenly he put on the brake and jumped out.

      “I've had a long turn,” he said. “But it's a treat of a swing—it's a real treat of a swing!”

      Miriam was amused that he took a swing so seriously and felt so warmly over it.

      “No; you go on,” she said.

      “Why, don't you want one?” he asked, astonished.

      “Well, not much. I'll have just a little.”

      She sat down, whilst he kept the bags in place for her.

      “It's so ripping!” he said, setting her in motion. “Keep your heels up, or they'll bang the manger wall.”

      She felt the accuracy with which he caught her, exactly at the right moment, and the exactly proportionate strength of his thrust, and she was afraid. Down to her bowels went the hot wave of fear. She was in his hands. Again, firm and inevitable came the thrust at the right moment. She gripped the rope, almost swooning.

      “Ha!” she laughed in fear. “No higher!”

      “But you're not a BIT high,” he remonstrated.

      “But no higher.”

      He heard the fear in her voice, and desisted. Her heart melted in hot pain when the moment came for him to thrust her forward again. But he left her alone. She began to breathe.

      “Won't you really go any farther?” he asked. “Should I keep you there?”

      “No; let me go by myself,” she answered.

      He moved aside and watched her.

      “Why, you're scarcely moving,” he said.

      She laughed slightly with shame, and in a moment got down.

      “They say if you can swing you won't be sea-sick,” he said, as he mounted again. “I don't believe I should ever be sea-sick.”

Скачать книгу