Again he gave a quick start at the suddenness of her action. Very stealthily her faunish eyes had stolen sideways, and then she had swiftly turned her head.
"Here, I say, don"t, Bessie!" he cried nervously. "You look awfully uncanny when you do that! You"re brooding," he continued, "that"s what you"re doing, brooding. You"re getting into a low state. You want bucking up. I don"t think I shall go to the Polytec. to-night; I shall stay and cheer you up. You know, I really don"t think you"re making an effort, darling."
His last words seemed to strike her. They seemed to fit in with something of which she too was conscious. "Not making an effort ..." she wondered how he knew that. She felt in some vague way that it was important that she should make an effort.
For, while her dream ever evaded her, and yet never ceased to call her with such a voice as he who reads on a magic page of the calling of elves hears stilly in his brain, yet somehow behind the seduction was another and a sterner voice. There was warning as well as fascination. Beyond that edge at which she strained on tiptoe, mingled with the jocund calls to Hasten, Hasten, were deeper calls that bade her Beware. They puzzled her. Beware of what? Of what danger? And to whom?...
"How do you mean, I"m not making an effort, Ed?" she asked slowly, again looking into the fire, where the kettle now made a gnat-like singing.
"Why, an effort to get all right again. To be as you used to be--as, of course, you will be soon."
"As I used to be?" The words came with a little check in her breathing.
"Yes, before all this. To be yourself, you know."
"Myself?"
"All jolly, and without these jerks and jumps. I wish you could get away.
A fortnight by the sea would do you all the good in the world."
She knew not what it was in the words "the sea" that caused her suddenly to breathe more deeply. The sea!... It was as if, by the mere uttering of them, he had touched some secret spring, brought to fulfilment some spell. What had he meant by speaking of the sea?... A fortnight before, had somebody spoken to her of the sea it would have been the sea of Margate, of Brighton, of Southend, that, supplying the image that a word calls up as if by conjuration, she would have seen before her; and what other image could she supply, could she possibly supply, now?... Yet she did, or almost did, supply one. What new experience had she had, or what old, old one had been released in her? With that confused, joyous dinning just beyond the range of physical hearing there had suddenly mingled a new illusion of sound--a vague, vast pash and rustle, silky and harsh both at once, its tireless voice holding meanings of stillness and solitude compared with which the silence that is mere absence of sound was vacancy. It was part of her dream, invisible, intangible, inaudible, yet there. As if he had been an enchanter, it had come into being at the word upon his lips. Had he other such words? Had he the Master Word that--(ah, she knew what the Master Word would do!)--would make the Vision the Reality and the Reality the Vision? Deep within her she felt something--her soul, herself, she knew not what--thrill and turn over and settle again....
"The sea," she repeated in a low voice.
"Yes, that"s what you want to set you up--rather! Do you remember that fortnight at Littlehampton, you and me and your Aunt? Jolly that was! I like Littlehampton. It isn"t flash like Brighton, and Margate"s always so beastly crowded. And do you remember that afternoon by the windmill? I did love you that afternoon, Bessie!"...
He continued to talk, but she was not listening. She was wondering why the words "the sea" were somehow part of it all--the pins and brooches of the Museum, the book on her knees, the dream. She remembered a game of hide-and-seek she had played as a child, in which cries of "Warm, warm, warmer!" had announced the approach to the hidden object. Oh, she was getting warm--positively hot....
He had ceased to talk, and was watching her. Perhaps it was the thought of how he had loved her that afternoon by the windmill that had brought him close to her chair again. She was aware of his nearness, and closed her eyes for a moment as if she dreaded something. Then she said quickly, "Is tea nearly ready, Ed?" and, as he turned to the table, took up the book again.
She felt that even to touch that book brought her "warmer." It fell open at a page. She did not hear the clatter Ed made at the table, nor yet the babble his words had evoked, of the pierrots and banjos and minstrels of Margate and Littlehampton. It was to hear a gladder, wilder tumult that she sat once more so still, so achingly listening....
_"The earnest trumpet spake, and silver thrills From kissing cymbals made a merry din--"_
The words seemed to move on the page. In her eyes another light than the firelight seemed to play. Her breast rose, and in her thick white throat a little inarticulate sound tw.a.n.ged.
"Eh? Did you speak, Bessie?" Ed asked, stopping in his b.u.t.tering of bread.
"Eh?... No."
In answering, her head had turned for a moment, and she had seen him.
Suddenly it struck her with force: what a shaving of a man he was!
Desk-chested, weak-necked, conscious of his little "important" lip and chin--yes, he needed a Polytechnic gymnastic course! Then she remarked how once, at Margate, she had seen him in the distance, as in a hired baggy bathing-dress he had bathed from a machine, in muddy water, one of a hundred others, all rather cold, flinging a polo-ball about and shouting stridently. "A sound mind in a sound body!"... He was rather vain of his neat shoes, too, and doubtless stunted his feet; and she had seen the little spot on his neck caused by the chafing of his collar-stud.... No, she did not want him to touch her, just now at any rate. His touch would be too like a betrayal of another touch ... somewhere, sometime, somehow ... in that tantalising dream that refused to allow itself either to be fully remembered or quite forgotten. What was that dream? What was it?...
She continued to gaze into the fire.
Of a sudden she sprang to her feet with a choked cry of almost animal fury. The fool had touched her. Carried away doubtless by the memory of that afternoon by the windmill, he had, in pa.s.sing once more to the kettle, crept softly behind her and put a swift burning kiss on the side of her neck.
Then he had retreated before her, stumbling against the table and causing the cups and saucers to jingle.
The basket-chair tilted up, but righted itself again.
"I told you--I told you--" she choked, her stockish figure shaking with rage, "I told you--you--"
He put up his elbow as if to ward off a blow.
"_You_ touch me--_you!--you!_" the words broke from her.
He had put himself farther round the table. He stammered.
"Here--dash it all, Bessie--what is the matter?"
"_You_ touch me!"
"All right," he said sullenly. "I won"t touch you again--no fear. I didn"t know you were such a firebrand. All right, drop it now. I won"t again. Good Lord!"
Slowly the white fist she had drawn back sank to her side again.
"All right now," he continued to grumble resentfully. "You needn"t take on so. It"s said--I won"t touch you again." Then, as if he remembered that after all she was ill and must be humoured, he began, while her bosom still rose and fell rapidly, to talk with an a.s.sumption that nothing much had happened. "Come, sit down again, Bessie. The tea"s in the pot and I"ll have it ready in a couple of jiffs. What a ridiculous little girl you are, to take on like that!... And I say, listen! That"s a m.u.f.fin-bell, and there"s a grand fire for toast! You sit down while I run out and get "em. Give me your key, so I can let myself in again--"
He took her key from her bag, caught up his hat, and hastened out.
But she did not sit down again. She was no calmer for his quick disappearance. In that moment when he had recoiled from her she had had the expression of some handsome and angered snake, its hood puffed, ready to strike. She stood dazed; one would have supposed that that ill-advised kiss of his had indeed been the Master Word she sought, the Word she felt approaching, the Word to which the objects of the Museum, the book, that rustle of a sea she had never seen, had been but the ever "warming"
stages. Some merest trifle stood between her and those elfin cries, between her and that thin golden mist in which faintly seen shapes seemed to move--shapes almost of tossed arms, waving, brandishing objects strangely all but familiar. That roaring of the sea was not the rushing of her own blood in her ears, that rosy flush not the artificial glow of the cheap red lampshade. The shapes were almost as plain as if she saw them in some clear but black mirror, the sounds almost as audible as if she heard them through some not very thick m.u.f.fling....
"Quick--the book," she muttered.
But even as she stretched out her hand for it, again came that solemn sound of warning. As if something sought to stay it, she had deliberately to thrust her hand forward. Again the high dinning calls of "Hasten!
Hasten!" were mingled with that deeper "Beware!" She knew in her soul that, once over that terrible edge, the Dream would become the Reality and the Reality the Dream. She knew nothing of the fluidity of the thing called Personality--not a thing at all, but a state, a balance, a relation, a resultant of forces so delicately in equilibrium that a touch, and--pff!--the horror of Formlessness rushed over all.
As she hesitated a new light appeared in the chamber. Within the frame of the small square window, beyond the ragged line of the chimney-cowls, an edge of orange brightness showed. She leaned forward. It was the full moon, rusty and bloated and flattened by the earth-mist.
The next moment her hand had clutched at the book.
_"Whence came ye, merry Damsels! Whence came ye So many, and so many, and such glee?
Why have ye left your bowers desolate, Your lutes, and gentler fate?
"We follow Bacchus, Bacchus on the wing A-conquering!
Bacchus, young Bacchus! Good or ill betide We dance before him thorough kingdoms wide!
Come hither, Lady fair, and joined be To our wild minstrelsy!""_
There was an instant in which darkness seemed to blot out all else; then it rolled aside, and in a blaze of brightness was gone. It was gone, and she stood face to face with her Dream, that for two thousand years had slumbered in the blood of her and her line. She stood, with mouth agape and eyes that hailed, her thick throat full of suppressed clamour. The other was the Dream now, and these!... they came down, mad and noisy and bright--Maenades, Thyades, satyrs, fauns--naked, in hides of beasts, ungirded, dishevelled, wreathed and garlanded, dancing, singing, shouting. The thudding of their hooves shook the ground, and the clash of their timbrels and the rustling of their thyrsi filled the air. They brandished frontal bones, the dismembered quarters of kids and goats; they struck the bronze cantharus, they tossed the silver obba up aloft.
Down a cleft of rocks and woods they came, trooping to a wide seash.o.r.e with the red of the sunset behind them. She saw the evening light on the sleek and dappled hides, the gilded ivory and rich brown of their legs and shoulders, the white of inner arms held up on high, their wide red mouths, the quivering of the twin flesh-gouts on the necks of the leaping fauns. And, shutting out the glimpse of sky at the head of the deep ravine, the G.o.d himself descended, with his car full of drunken girls who slept with the serpents coiled about them.
Shouting and moaning and frenzied, leaping upon one another with libidinous laughter and beating one another with the half-stripped thyrsi, they poured down to the yellow sands and the anemonied pools of the sh.o.r.e. They raced to the water, that gleamed pale as nacre in the deepening twilight in the eye of the evening star. They ran along its edge over their images in the wet sands, calling their lost companion.
"Hasten, hasten!" they cried; and one of them, a young man with a torso n.o.ble as the dawn and shoulder-lines strong as those of the eternal hills, ran here and there calling her name.
"Louder, louder!" she called back in an ecstasy.