Sheila Kaye-Smith

“ Len was up and in the yard, Janet was in the kitchen—but neither saw him as he stole out of the house and up the lane.
He left it soon after passing Wilderwick, and plunged into a field. The grass was covered with frost-crystals, beginning to melt in the lemon glare of the sun. It was a strange, yellow dawn, dream-like, pathetic—a little wind fluttered with it from the east, and smote the hedges into ghostly rustlings. Nigel crept through the pasture as if he feared to wake some one asleep, and entered the first of his woods. ”

“ In this other love he would find the peace and happiness and goodness that Janey had ached and striven for years to give him; he would learn to forget the wicked Janey Furlonger, whose love had all but been his perdition, who had brought him to sin and torture and despair—and now would lie in the background of his heart, as an evil thing we cover up and pray to forget. This young, innocent girl would save him from his memories of the woman who had given more for his sake than Tony Strife would ever dream of giving. ”

“ A terrible thing had happened to Nigel—he had begun to hope. When hope has been a long time away, the return of it is like the return of sensation to a frost-bitten limb. It pricks, it burns, it tortures. It tortured Nigel till a cry of anguish burst from him, bitterer than in any of his fits of despair. He bent forward, clapping his hand to his side.
Hope showed him the doors of his prison flung wide at last. For long years he had never dreamed of escape, he was a captive, so fast in prison that he could not get forth—free only among the dead. ”

“ And then there's love, Janey, that's one of the things we never find, though we seek it till our tears are blood. I've written a poem about that, comparing love to the sea—to salt water, rather, for of course hundreds of poets have compared love to the sea. Love is like the salt water that splashes round the poor sailor dying of thirst—he drinks it in his desperation, and the more he drinks the fiercer becomes his thirst, and still he drinks on in despair and hope, till at last he ends in madness—that's love. ”

“ Len and Janey asked no questions—it was pathetic how few questions they asked him nowadays—but they both noticed he was happier. He did not speak much—he sat in a kind of dream, with a wistful tremulousness in the corners of his mouth. His mouth had always been the oldest part of him—hard in repose and fierce in movement—but to-night it had taken some of the extreme childishness of his eyes. Nigel felt very much the same as a child that cries for the moon and is given a ball to play with—the ball almost makes him forget that he wants the moon so badly. ”

“ There was no love in the woods—love had passed out of them in September, leaving them very quiet, very peaceful, in a great brown hush of sleep. Love was what hurt in life—love and brains; take away these and you take away suffering. Oh, if love and thought could go together out of his life as they had gone out of the woods—and leave him in a great brown hush of sleep.
For nearly an hour he lay in the brake, hidden by golden tangles of bracken and stiff clumps of tansy. He had begun to drowse, and capture rags of happiness in dreams, when suddenly he heard a rustling in the bushes. ”

“ He crossed from Sussex into Surrey at Hackenden, then plunged through Ashplats Wood into the Wilderwick road. His footsteps were like shadows on the awful silence that filled the night. The stars were flashing from a coal-black sky—between the high hedges only a wisp of the great waste was visible with its dazzle of constellations. Nigel saw Cancer burning his lamps in the west, while straight above him hung the sign of Libra, brilliant, cold, unearthly. Surely the stars were larger and brighter to-night than was normal, than was good. He wished he was at Sparrow Hall. ”

“ His shoulders shook, and tears rushed scalding into Janet's eyes. With one hand she stroked and tangled his coarse hair, the other he had seized and laid under his cheek—and she felt one burning tear upon it. Her whole heart seemed to open itself to her lover in tender pity, and not only to him, but to all men—men, with their fierceness in desire and gentleness in satiety, with their terrible sudden temptations, their weakness and nobleness, their beasthood and their godhead. Men struck her—had always struck her—as intensely pathetic; and now Quentin and his love wrung her breast with tears. ”

“ Sunshine baked on the fields, and drank the green out of the grass, so that the fields were brown, with splashes of yellow where the buttercups still grew. In the hedges the wild elder-rose sent out its sickening sweetness, while from the ditches came the even more cloying fragrance of the meadowsweet. The haze of a great heat veiled the distance from Nigel, as he tramped over the parched grass into Kent. He saw the roofs of Scarlets and Redpale shimmering in the valley of the hammer ponds, but beyond them was a fiery, thundering dusk, which swallowed up the hills of Cowden in the east. ”

“ Nigel dashed his bow down on the deep strings, and forced deep sounds out of them. The wind galloped up to a shriek—and Nigel's hand tore into harmonics, and wailed there till the wind was only puffing and sobbing. Then the fiddle sobbed. The fiddle and the wind sobbed together ... till the wind swung up a scale—up came the fiddle after it ... the wind rushed higher and higher, it whistled in the dark eaves of the inn, and the fiddle squeaked higher and higher, and Nigel's fingers strained on the fingerboard—he would not be beaten, blind Nature should not defeat him, two should play her game. ”

“ Janet Furlonger sat waiting in the kitchen of Sparrow Hall—now and then springing up to lift the lid off the pot and smell the brown soup, or to put her face to the window-pane and watch the creeping night, seen dimly through the thick green glass and the mists that steamed up from the fields of Wilderwick.
Janet was immensely tall, and her movements were grand and free. In rest she had a kind of statuesque dignity: she did not stoop, as if ashamed of her height, but held herself proudly, with lifted chin. People used to say that she walked as if she were showing off beautiful clothes. ”

“ The train was the heart of the night and darkness, pulsing in ceaseless despair, and he was the heart of the train, pulsing despairingly too, the very centre of sorrow. It was a definite strain for him to realise this, and yet somehow the sensation would not relax—it was infinite relief when at last the great, noisy heart, the heart of the train, stopped beating, though its silence brought with it a sudden wrench and shock, like death.
Nigel stumbled out on the East Grinstead platform, his limbs cramped, his head swimming. ”

“ There are moments in a woman's life when she is simply staggered by the selfishness of the male, and yet to every woman there is something inevitable about it, so that it does not stir up her rage and contempt, as it would if she saw it in her own sex. Janey felt no anger with Quentin, she only thought how pitifully young he looked.
There was a pause—a long pause, broken by the rustling of the wind in the garden. Janey's eyes were fixed on Quentin's face, her whole being seemed concentrated upon it, all her thoughts, all her passion, all her pity. Poor child! poor, poor boy! ”

“ She thought of the days when his name had rung like bells in her heart, without a horrid dissonance of fear, when his letters were pure joy, and the thought of meeting him pure anticipation. Would those days return?—And now, here was his silence, consuming her. Why didn't he write? He had been so eager in his last letter, though, as usual, eagerness had soon been throttled by despair.
"I shall have you—I shall have you at last, my beautiful, tall Janey, for whom I hunger. But I am filled with doubts. There are some men in whose mouths manna turns to dust and the water of life to gall. ”

“ Quentin Lowe had not taken Tony from him after all. The Tony he loved had never known Quentin Lowe, she had been no man's friend but Nigel Furlonger's—and so much his friend that when he had been taken from her she would not stay without him, but herself had gone away. Quentin Lowe loved a beautiful woman—proud and sweet and assured, with just a dash of the prig about her. Nigel had never loved this woman, he had loved a little girl—and the little girl who had been his comrade in the Kentish lanes and the ruins of Brambletye, would never be any man's but his. ”

“ It was [Pg 102] a fragment of that strange, new part of him, which had been born in prison, and frightened Len and Janey—the child.
He could not remember that before his dark years he had felt particularly young for his age, or cared for young society; but now his heart seemed full of irrepressible torrents of youth. He wanted to be with boys and girls, to hear their shouts, to share their laughter, to join in their games—not as a "grown-up," but as one of themselves. Why did every one expect him to have grown old in prison? Sorrow does not always make old, it often makes young. ”

“ Nigel had a special love for distances—for three years he had not been able to look further than a wall some thirty yards off, except when he lifted his eyes to that one far view prison could not rob him of, the sky. Now the stretch of distant fields, the blur of distant woods, the gleam of distant windows in distant farms, even the distant gape of Oxted chalk-pit among the Surrey hills, filled him with an ineffable sense of quiet and liberty. ”

“ What appealed to Nigel was never the technique of a composition, but its emotional quality. Music was to him not so much sound as feeling—he did not value a piece for its own intrinsic beauty, but for the emotions it was able to call forth. As he played that morning whole cycles of experience passed before him. All the old dreams that for three years had lain dead in his violin now revived—but a new quality was added to them, a soft twang of sorrow. ”

“ How cruel of Tony!—and yet all children, even girl-children, are cruel. Their experience of sorrow is limited to its tempestuous side—they do not know its aching calms; they quench their thirst with great gulps, and do not know the relief of small drops of water. This was the price he had to pay for seeking his comfort in the gaiety of boys and girls instead of in the more stable sympathy of his contemporaries. ”

“ High above the frosty exhalations of the dusk, piling walls of smoke-scented mist round the cottages, the stars shone like the lights of celestial villages, dotting the dark country of the sky. The Wain hung tilted in the north, lonely and ominous, Betelgeuse was bright above Sussex, Aldebaran burned luminous and lonely in his quarter. Nigel watched the Sign of Virgo, which had just risen, and glowed over the woods of Langerish. It flickered like candles in the wind. Then he dropped his eyes to the darkness round him, and through it came the creak of a harmonium. ”

“ Janey's hand went up to his face and stroked it. Quentin's furies always struck her as infinitely pathetic.
"It'll be all right, dear," she whispered. "I'm sure it will. You're bound to get free."
He seized her hand and held it fiercely in his while he stared into her eyes.
"Janey—I sometimes wonder if I'll ever get free—or if I do, whether I'll find freedom the ecstasy I imagine it. Perhaps freedom, like everything else, is a mirage, a snare, a disillusion. Yesterday I was reading the Epic of Gilgamesh—
Gilgamesh, why dost thou wander around? ”

“ He had never before tried to extemporise, his violin had been for him a memory of sugary tunes, each wrapped up in the tinsel of a little past—he had never tried to wring the present out of it in a sudden, fierce expression of the emotions that tortured him as he played. This evening he wanted to join the wind in its wailing race, to rush with it over the common, to tear with it through the hedges, and sweep with it over the water. He forced out of his fiddle the cries of his own heart—they rose up and challenged the wind. ”

“ However, though he could not be seen, he could see, for on the path stood a golden pillar of sunshine into which the footsteps must pass. Nigel wondered if it could be Lowe, returning early for some reason from Shovelstrode. But the steps did not sound heavy enough, and the next minute he saw the white of a woman's dress through the trees. In an instant his limbs had shrunk together, for another of those sickening blows had smitten his brain. The figure had passed out of the pillar of sunset, but he had seen Tony Strife as she went by. ”

“ Nigel looked into the stranger's face, and again experienced a slight shock of surprise. The eyes in the midst of its florid circumference were haunted with despair, grief-stricken and appealing. He suddenly realised that it was not normal for a man to spend Christmas day in lonely petrol prowlings.
"Play some more."
"I can only play Verdi and Balfe and those others."
"Well, I'll try to endure it."
"Look here," said Furlonger, "what's your game? Why should you want me to play when you hate my music?"
"I hate your music, but I like your playing. You are a wonderful player." ”

“ This afternoon he was wandering towards the valley of the hammer ponds. It was nearly seven when he came to Furnace Wood. The sun was swimming to the west through whorls of heat. A sullen glow crawled over the sky, nearly brown in the west. The air hung heavy in the wood, laden with the pungency of midsummer flowers and grasses—scarcely a leaf stirred, though now and then an unaccountable rustling shudder passed through the thickets. ”