During the week that followed, Gilbert heard nothing of Emmie or of the Sunday-night affair. He was busy at Haysfall during the day, and during some of the evenings. He might have made an opportunity for running over to Woodhouse: but he didn’t.
Sunday came again: a fine day for once, dim-blue and wintry. Gilbert looked out of his window upon it when he got up, and after breakfast went out into the woodyard. Tall yellow timbers reared up into the sky, leaning to one another and crossing in the air. Planks, correctly arranged in squares, with a space between each plank, stood seasoning. In the shed were planks and poles in solid piles. Near a chopping-block was a pile of split faggots, while huge trunks of trees, oak and elm, stripped of branches, lay aside like swathed corpses. Gilbert noticed the star-shaped cracks that ran from the centres of the trunk-bottoms, thought of the plant-histology, and in a dim sort of way calculated the combination of forces that had brought about the fissures. He ran his finger over a heavy-grained oak surface, and to him it was an exquisite pleasure, vibrating in his veins like music, to realise the flexible but grandly-based rhythm in the morphological structure of the tree, right from the root-tip through the sound trunk, right out to a leaf-tip: wonderful concatenation and association of cells, incalculable and yet so genetic in their rhythm, unfolding the vast unsymmetrical symmetry of the tree. What he loved so much in plant morphology was, that given a fixed mathematical basis, the final evolution was so incalculable. It pleased him to trace inherent individual qualities in each separate organic growth, qualities which were over and above the fixed qualities belonging to the genus and the species, and which could not really be derived by a chain of evolutionary cause-and-effect. Could they? Could the individual peculiarities all derive from the chain of cause and effect? He mused abstractedly. The question piqued him. He had almost decided not. The one little element of individuality, not attributable to any cause, fascinated him always in plants and trees. He longed to make quite sure of it. He longed to feel it musically. In plants it seemed to him so profoundly suggestive, the odd aloneness of the separate self in each specimen. He longed to hear the new note of this in music. But his longing was vague, far removed from the intensity of action.
He dawdled the morning away, with his pipe. There were things he ought to do. But he could not begin. He sat in the kitchen by the fire, glancing over the large pages of Lloyd’s Weekly, the lurid Sunday paper, whilst the woman made pies and an apple dumpling, and continually pushed past him to the oven: whilst the saucepans bubbled and sent off first a smell of pudding-cloth, then a scent of vegetable steam: whilst the meat sizzled in the oven, and his father came and went, fidgetty, and drank a glass of beer between-whiles.
Between father and son there was not much correspondence. The old man was mean, and he kept his heart also to himself. He looked with a jealous eye on his son, half-scorning him because he did no real work, nothing in the woodyard, for example, and in the other half admiring him for being so clever. At the bottom he was domineeringly gratified to have the lad at home, though he found every manner of fault with him. His only other child, a girl, a woman now, was married with children of her own, and because she needed a little more money, the old man was secredy determined to leave all to Gilbert.
A few instincts Gilbert had of a gentleman so-called. He could not bear to sit down to dinner unshaven and with no collar on, as his father did. So, judging from the smell of the sirloin that it was nearly done, he went upstairs to his room and shaved and dressed. His bedroom was bare and tidy. There was not a picture, not a book. From the window he looked down on the woodyard. But next to his bedroom was a sort of study, with many books, and a piano, a violin and music-stand, piles and sheets of music. This room too was tidy and clean, though Gilbert tidied and cleaned it all himself.
Being dressed, he went and touched his violin: but he did not want to play. He turned over a sheet of music: but did not want to look at it. He waited for the woman to call him to dinner.
After dinner, he had still his mind to make up. He went out to his motor-cycle and got it ready. He went indoors and put on his rubbers. He pushed off, and was running noiselessly down Whetstone’s steep main street, past tram-cars and saunterers, before he knew where he was going.
And then, after all, he turned towards Woodhouse. In half an hour he was there, and had put up his cycle. Coming out brushed and tidy on to the Knarborough Road, he hesitated which way to turn. Therefore he did not turn, but walked forward.
And whom should he see but Patty Goddard walking down the rather empty street: it was too soon for the afternoon chapel people, and the men were having a last drink before half-past two. Patty, in a dark, wine-coloured coat and skirt and dark silk hat, with grey gloves and very carefully-chosen shoes, walking by herself with her pale, full, ivory face towards the afternoon sun! She smiled across the road to him, and nodded. He strode over to her.
“Oh — ! I thought you might come this afternoon or evening,” she said, and he felt a touch of significance in her voice, and was uncomfortable.
“Is Lewie there?” he asked, jerking his head in the direction of the house.
“No. He’s gone to an I. L. P. meeting in Knarborough. I expect him back about six. Did you want him?”
Again her dark eyes seemed to glance up at him with a certain mocking spite.
“No — no,” said Gilbert.
“Another appointment, perhaps?” smiled Patty maliciously.
“No, I haven’t. I’ve got nothing to do.”
“Oh well then, if you’d care to take a walk. I’m just enjoying the sun while it lasts.”
“Yes, if you don’t mind.”
And he took his place at her side. She was pleased. But today her pleasure was qualified, though she kept the qualification a secret. She made no more mention of the previous Sunday, and the conversation between them was rather lame.
They descended the hill in the pleasant afternoon, and came to the damp, mossy old park wall, under the trees. Patty stopped before the unimposing, wooden park gate.
“I thought I’d walk across the park,” she said. “Lewie has managed to get the key.”
So Gilbert opened the gate, and they walked along the pink-coloured drive, between the greenish winter grass. The old hall was shut up, everywhere seemed abandoned in the wintry sunshine of the afternoon. Just before they came to the second gate, the gate of the forlorn garden, Patty went to a huge beech-tree, and smilingly took out a pair of rubber overshoes.
“We keep all kinds of surprises here,” she said. “But I love to walk across the grass past the brook. I love the sound of water so much, and the berries are so beautiful this year.”
It was true. The dark, shaggy, hairy hawthorn-trees had a purplish-burning look, they were still so heavy with haws. They stood about fairly numerous in the near part of the park. Gilbert and Patty walked along the crest of the stagnant, artificial ponds, that lay melancholy in their abandon below the old house. Then Patty led the way across the rough grass, to the brook which ratded and clucked under deep hedges. Gilbert helped her to pick scarlet rose-berries, and black privet berries, and white snow-berries from the bushes that grew rampant down by the brook. Patty flushed with exercise and pleasure. She was happy gathering the wet, bright, cold berries on their twigs and branches, she was excited being helped by the young man near her. It was such a pungent chill isolation, this of theirs down in the hollow of the forsaken park, the open country, pathless, stretching the dim beyond.
“Aren’t they beautiful! Aren’t they lovely!” said Patty, holding out the bunch between her white hands. The scarlet and black and white-heavy berries looked well in her hands. Her pale face was almost like an ivory snow-berry itself, set with dark, half-tired, half-malicious eyes. Her mouth set in an odd way, a slight grimace of malice against life. She had had such a happy married life, such a perfect love with Lewie.
She stepped forward over the grass, a cloud on her flushed, strange face of a woman of forty who has been married for twenty years in what she considers an ideal happiness.
“Tell me now,” she said to him, with her intensive seriousness of a franchised woman, “how you look on marriage.” And she glanced at him furtively, a touch of unconscious, general malevolence between her brows.
“Marriage? Me? Why I don’t know,” came Gilbert’s gruff voice. Then he stood still, to ponder. She watched his face. He looked forwards and upwards, into space. “I shall marry some day,” he said.
“You will? But what sort of woman? What sort of marriage will it be?”
He pondered still.
“Why,” he said, “a woman with brains, I think. A woman who could stand on her own feet, not one who would cling to me. I shouldn’t mind, you know, what she did. If she liked another man, all right. We could be good pals. Oh, I should want a woman to do as she liked.”
Patty watched him sardonically, then strode on a few paces.
“You would? You think you would?” she replied, and the sardonic touch sounded in her voice. She was thinking how young he was, and how full of mental conceit. He glanced down at her, and his full, dark blue eye met her brown, onyx- bright eye. A flush came over her face, and a doubt over his mind, or his spirit, rather.
“I think so,” he said.
“Yes, you think so,” she replied quietly, walking on. He followed in silence.
“Why?” he said. “Don’t you?”
She stopped and turned round to him, smiling suddenly her face seeming to flicker all over with a strange, ivory- coloured flame, amid which her eyes showed dark.
“Ah!” she said. “What a difference there is between what you think now and what you’ll think afterwards!”
She was usually rather uncouth in expressing herself, and he, for the moment, was dazzled, had lost his feet. He only looked at her, at her strange, changed, almost uncanny face, so tense in its laughing. Something stirred in his veins. Something completely unusual awoke in him.
He had never had any real contact with a woman: only with tarts and bits of girls and sports like Emmie. Other women, such as Patty, had always been to him dresses with faces. And now, to his terror, something else seemed to be emerging from her face, a new Aphrodite from the stiff dark sea of middle-aged matronliness, an Aphrodite drenched with knowledge, rising in a full, ivory-soft nudity, infinitely more alluring than anything flapperdom could offer. Some veil was rent in his consciousness, and he remained a moment lost, open-mouthed. Patty dropped her eyes, and her smile became small and a little weary.
She had had to try to beat the flappers and the sports. She had had to try to break the spoon spell: which was the spell of her marriage, alas. And she saw the beginnings of victory. But she was frightened. After all, she too was very fixed in her old way of life, up to the neck in the stiff wave of her fine serge dress. And to rise like Aphrodite — ah, after all — ! There were so many considerations. Perhaps she was more frightened even than he.
He remained bemused, suddenly realising the soft, full Aphrodite steeped in the old sea of matrimony, and ready to rise, perhaps: rise from the correct, wine-coloured coat and skirt of fine serge in all her exquisite fulness and softness of forty years, and all the darkness of a finished past in her eyes. A finished past. The sense of it came over him with a shock. He looked at her — but she was walking slowly, with bent head. He saw the outline of her forty-year-old cheek, full and ivory-white: he saw the bowed head. And in the flame that ran from his heels to his head all the Emmies of the world withered and were gone like so many shavings.
“What do you think of marriage yourself?” he blurted out.
“Ah!” — she only half looked at him, funking the question, and answering archly: “I don’t think about it, for myself. I have it behind me. You have it ahead of you. There’s a difference.”
He watched her, puzzling over her. She would not look at him, except with a screwed-up, baffling sort of smile. He pondered in his logical way.
“But what you have behind you, have I got that in front of me?” he asked, putting himself in Lewie’s place for all the past years, and not feeling himself fit.
Patty was caught in the net of her own words.
“No,” she said, seriously, becoming again the clumsy, thinking-woman. “No! You’re a generation younger than that. You’re bound to start different from where we started. But you’ve got to start somewhere.”
Her phrases came out clumsily.
“Perhaps where you left off,” he said, inspired.
She flushed suddenly like a red camellia flower. She was very like a camellia flower: usually creamy-white, now rose.
“Yes,” she said, in her suffragette voice now. “Very probably where we leave off! Very probably.” She was retreating on to safe ground: the platform of Woman. He felt it: and still, in his one-sighted way, was looking for the full, soft, pale Aphrodite.
“Then I should want a woman who’s been through it all,” he said, logically infallible.
She winced, and retreated further on to the dry boards of the theoretic platform.
“I don’t know. I shouldn’t like to be so sure. There are many kinds of women in the world: many more than you have ever dreamed of. You don’t see them — but they’re there. You see little — remarkably little, if I may have the impudence to say so.”
And she smiled at him in the old, matronly, woman-who- thinks fashion. But it had no effect this time, because, between the blinkers of his logical concentration, he was looking ahead along his own road.
“Yes — I think that’s true. I think that’s true. But you won’t get me to believe that you can find me a girl, a woman under thirty, who can start where a woman of your age and experience leaves off. You won’t get me to believe it.”
“Why not?” she cried. “Can you judge, now? Can you, of all men judge? Can you even have any idea where it is that a woman of my age and experience leaves off? How do you know?”
Now she was fencing with other weapons, trying to flirt with him. But she had reckoned without her host. She was not prepared for the blinkers of concentration which shut out from this Balaam’s ass of a mathematician all the side-tracks into which she would cajole him, and sent him straight ahead with his nose against the opposing angel.
He looked straight down on her, with full, dark blue eye. And she, suddenly caught as by an apparition, was so startled that she let the crinkly smile fall from her face, and the fencing cunning drop like a mask from her eyes. For a second she met his look of strange inquiry, and it was more than she could bear. Her heart ceased beating, she wilted backwards. Mercifully, he began to speak.
“I’ve just realised something,” he said. “And you can’t make me believe different till I realise something else.”
What she heard in this speech was that he loved her: loved not the girl in her, nor the independent, modern, theorising woman Lewie had loved; not that, but the soft, full, strange, unmated Aphrodite of forty, who had been through all the ideal raptures of love and marriage and modern motherhood, through it all, and through the foam of the fight for freedom, the sea of ideal right and wrong, and now was emerging, slowly, mysteriously, ivory-white and soft, woman still, leaving the sea of all her past, nay, the sea of all the extant human world behind her, and rising with dark eyes of age and experience, and a few grey hairs among the dark; soft, full- bodied, mature, and woman still, unpossessed, unknown of men, unfathomed, unexplored, belonging nowhere and to no one, only to the unknown distance, the untrodden shore of all the sea of all the unknown knowledge. Aphrodite, mistress, mother of all the worlds of unknown knowledge that lie over our horizon, she felt him looking at her with strange full eyes, seeing her in her unguessed ivory-soft nudity, the darkness of her promise in her eyes, the woman of forty, and desiring her with a profound desire that seemed like a deep, far-off bell booming, or a sea coming up.
And her strength ebbed, it was too much for her.
“Hadn’t we better be turning home?” she asked, wide-eyed and pathetic.
“Ay, I suppose we had,” he answered automatic.
And they veered on the wintry grass, in the pale-coloured wintry afternoon. They had walked to the far end of the park, where it was open like a wide, rough meadow. At this end some rather shaggy cattle were out to pasture, winter-rough creatures. Some rough horses were in a far corner, by the fence.
Patty was looking round her, with a sort of anxious look on her face. She wanted to get back, back on to the road: above all, back into her own pleasant room, with her feet on her own hassock.
“You don’t mind cows, do you?” asked Gilbert, noticing her anxiety.
“No. I don’t like them though — not too near. I didn’t know these were here.”
“They’re all right,” said Gilbert.
“Oh yes, I’m sure they are,” she said. But she hurried rather nervously. Glancing round, she said anxiously:
“Do you think that one means mischief?”
He saw a heifer putting her head down.
“No,” he said negligently. He had no natural fear of cattle.
“She does,” said Patty vehemently. “She’s coming.”
“Not she,” said Gilbert easily.
But Patty was looking round in fear.
“Where can I go?” she cried.
“Don’t bother,” he said.
But she glanced round and gave a cry.
“She’s coming.” And she started running forward, blindly, with little, frightened steps. Patty was making for the brook, as the nearest safety.
Gilbert turned round. And sure enough, the heifer, with her head down, was running forward in that straight line of vicious intent which cows have when they do mean mischief. Gilbert was startled. Patty’s nervousness unnerved him also. His instinct was to take to his heels. But he remained where he was, in a moment of stupefaction.
The heifer was going for Mrs Goddard. She was a dark- red creature with sharp horns. Gilbert gave a shout, and running forwards to the vicious, disagreeable-tempered beast, he flung his cherry-wood walking-stick at her. It caught her on the neck and rattled in her horns. She wavered, shook her head, and stopped. Gilbert took off his overcoat, and whirling it by the sleeve, walked towards her. She watched — snorted — suddenly with a round swerve made off, galloping into the distance, her tail in the air, female and defiant.
“She’s gone. Don’t run. She’s all right,” he called to the speeding Patty.
Patty glanced round with a white face of anguish.
“No. She’ll come again,” she said, in a stifled voice. And she pressed forward.
“She won’t. You needn’t hurry,” said Gilbert, hastening after the dark little form of the woman, who pressed forward blindly, with hurried steps. He followed at some distance behind her, having recovered his stick.
The cow had stopped, and was watching. When he looked again, she had her head down and was coming on again.
“Damn the thing!” he exclaimed, in nervousness and anger. And stick in one hand, overcoat in the other, he started walking towards the animal, like some nervous toreador.
The cow ran at him. He threw his overcoat right in her face, and turned and ran also for a few paces. When he looked round, the cow was galloping in a funny, jerky zigzag, with his overcoat hanging on one horn, stumbling, snorting, shaking her head. There went his overcoat.
Patty was at the brook, climbing down among the bushes. The cow was prancing and jerking in the near distance, floundering with the black overcoat. He stood with his stick, and waited. He wanted his coat.
So he set off after the cow. She was a rare scarecrow, plunging and ducking in fear and fury. He pursued her as she dodged, shouting after her. At last she trod on the coat and got it off her horn, and went galloping away. He recovered his garment and returned after Patty.
She had scrambled through the deep brook and up the other bank, and was leaning against a tree with her eyes shut, faint. Her feet were full of water, there was brown earth on her skirt at the knee, where she had scrambled, and her breast was heaving, she could not speak.
When he came up he was filled with consternation.
“Has it upset you?” he asked, not knowing what to do.
“Frightened me,” she murmured, gasping. She was ill. She could not stand up. She subsided at the foot of the tree, with her head dropped.
He stood near, looking on in distress and anxiety. He did not know in the least what to do. He wanted to put his coat for her to sit on, but did not like to disturb her. Her head was dropped as if she was unconscious, but her bosom laboured.
He waited, in nervous, irritable suspense. Her breathing seemed to be quieter. At last she lifted her head. Her face was paper-white, there were dark lines under her eyes, her eyes seemed dimmed.
“I’m sorry to give you so much trouble,” she said, rather ghosdily. “But it’s my heart. It gives way — on these occasions.”
She seemed a shattered, elderly woman. He felt pity, distress, shame, and irritation.
At last she put her hand on the earth to rise. He assisted her, and steadied her. He had seen her overshoes full of water.
“Let me take off your goloshes,” he said.
She leaned against the tree as he did so. He saw her nice shoes were wet too. And he wiped her skirt with his handkerchief where it was soiled.
“Thank you! Thank you!” she said. “It’s awfully weak of me. But I can’t help it.” She closed her eyes, haggardly.
“Don’t you bother. Let me do what I can for you,” he answered kindly.
“Thank you. I’m feeling better now.”
He waited still for her, as she leaned against the tree.
“If it weren’t for my heart — ” she said, looking at him with an abstract, hopeless smile. She was scarcely aware who he was.
“Yes, you can do nothing when your heart goes,” he said sympathetically.
At last she drew herself together, haggard-looking.
“I’ll see if I can walk,” she said, her mouth thin and pinched and frightened. He held her by the arm to support her, and wished they were both out of the situation.
So they crossed the meadow, crept through a fence into a bit of an orchard, and through the orchard gate into the road. She suffered agonies of self-consciousness because people saw them, and agonies of self-consciousness all the way home, because of her appearance. It seemed a cruel long way. And Gilbert at her side took step after step, and thought to himself his luck was out as regards women. As a matter of fact, the accident of the cow was rather a bitter blow to him, though he formulated nothing in his consciousness. Still, he felt that his heart had wakened and risen, and been knocked back again with a mallet-stroke. But he took it rather for granted that life was like that.
As for poor Patty, she felt humiliated, and was rather petulant. She recovered from her shock as she walked home, but her face did not lose all its haggardness and its broken look. And she wanted Lewie. She badly wanted Lewie to come home. She wanted him to be there. The presence of this other man was a strain on her. She wanted her husband.