Dusty answer

by Rosamond Lehmann

1

WHEN Judith was eighteen, she saw that the house next door, empty for years, was getting ready again. Gardeners mowed and mowed, and rolled and rolled the tennis-court; and planted tulips and forget-me-nots in the stone urns that bordered the lawn at the river’s edge. The ivy’s long fingers were torn away from the windows, and the solid grey stone front made prim and trim. When the blinds went up and the familiar oval mirror-backs once more stared from the bedroom windows it seemed as if the long time of emptiness had never been, and that the next-door children must still be there with their grandmother,—mysterious and thrilling children who came and went, and were all cousins except two who were brothers, and all boys except one, who was a girl; and who dropped over the peach-tree wall into Judith’s garden with invitations to tea and hide-and-seek.

But in truth all was different now. The grandmother had died soon after she heard Charlie was killed. He had been her favourite, her darling one. He had, astoundingly, married the girl Mariella when they were both nineteen, and he just going to the front. He had been killed directly, and some months afterwards Mariella had had a baby.

Mariella was twenty-two years old now, Charlie’s widow with a child Charlie had begotten. It seemed fantastic when you looked back and remembered them both. The grandmother had left the house to Mariella, and she was coming back to live there and have a gay time now that the war was well over and Charlie (so you supposed) forgotten.

Would Mariella remember Judith next door, and how they used to share a governess and do the same lessons in spite of Mariella’s four years’ seniority? Miss Pim wrote: ‘Judith is an exceptionally clever child, especially about essays and botany. She laps up knowledge as a kitten laps milk’. The letter had been left on Mamma’s desk: unforgettable, shameful, triumphant day.

Mariella on the other hand—how she used to sit with her clear light eyes blank, and her polite cool little treble saying: ‘Yes, Miss Pim,’ ‘No, Miss Pim,’—and never be interested and never understand! She wrote like a child of six. She would not progress. And yet, as Miss Pim said, Mariella was by no means what you’d call a stupid girl.... By no means a stupid girl: thrilling to Judith. Apart from the thrill which her own queerness gave, she had upon her the reflected glory of the four boy-cousins who came for the holidays,—Julian, Charlie, Martin and Roddy.

Now they were all grown up. Would they come back when Mariella came? And would they remember Judith at all, and be glad to see her again? She knew that, anyway, they would not remember so meticulously, so achingly as herself: people never did remember her so hard as she remembered them,—their faces especially. In earliest childhood it was plain that nobody else realized the wonder, the portentous mystery of faces. Some patterns were so pure, so clear and lovely you could go on looking at them for ever. Charlie’s and Marietta’s were like that. It was odd that the same bits of face shaped and arranged a little differently gave such deplorable results. Julian was the ugly one. And sometimes the ugliest faces did things that were suddenly lovely. Julian’s did. You dared not take eyes off a stranger’s face for fear of missing a change in it.

‘My dear! How your funny little girl stares. She makes me quite uncomfortable.’

‘Don’t worry, my dear. She doesn’t even see you. Always in the clouds.’

The stupids went on stupidly chattering. They little knew about faces. They little knew what a fearful thing could happen to a familiar face—Miss Pim’s for instance—surprised off its guard and broken up utterly into grossness, withered into hatred or cunning; or what a mystery it was to see a face day after day and find it always strange and surprising. Roddy’s was that sort, though at first it had seemed quite dull and flat. It had some secret in it.

At night in bed she invented faces, putting the pieces together till suddenly there they were!—quite clear. They had names and vague sorts of bodies and lived independent lives inside her head. Often they turned out to have a likeness to Roddy. The truth was, Judith thought now, Roddy’s was a dream rather than a real face. She felt she had never seen it as it actually was, but always with that overstressed significance, that haunting quality of curiousness which a face in a dream bears.

Queer Roddy must be twenty-one now; and Martin twenty; and Julian twenty-four at least; and beautiful Charlie would have been Mariella’s age if such an incredible thing had not happened to him. They would not want anything to do with her. They would be grown up and smart, with friends from London; and she still had her hair down and wore black cotton stockings, and blushed wildly, hopelessly, eternally, when addressed in public. It would be appalling to meet them again, remembering so much they had certainly forgotten. She would be tongue-tied.

In the long spaces of being alone which they only, at rarer and rarer intervals, broke, she had turned them over, fingered them so lovingly, explored them so curiously that, melting into the darkly-shining enchanted shadow-stuff of remembered childhood, they had become well-nigh fantastic creatures. Presumably they had realised long ago that Charlie was dead. When they came back again, without him, she would have to believe it too. To see them again would be a deep wrenching sort of hurt. If only it could be supposed it would hurt them too!... But Charlie had of course been dead for years; and of course they did not know what it was to want to know and understand and absorb people to such a degree that it was a fever. Or if they did, it was not upon her, trifling female creature, that they applied their endeavours. Even Martin, the stupid and ever-devoted, had felt, for a certainty, no mysterious excitement about her.

When she looked backwards and thought about each of them separately, there were only a few odd poignant trivialities of actual fact to remember.

Mariella’s hair was cut short like a boy’s. It came over her forehead in a fringe, and beneath it her lucid mermaid’s eyes looked out in a blind transparent stare, as if she were dazzled. Her skin was milk-white, her lips a small pink bow, her neck very long on sloping shoulders, her body tall and graceful with thin snakey long limbs. Her face was without expression, composed and cool-looking. The only change it ever suffered was the perfect upward lift of the lips when they smiled their limited smile. Her voice was a small high flute, with few inflections, monotonous but soft and sweet-tempered. She spoke little. She was remote and unruffled, coolly friendly. She never told you things.

She had a great Dane and she went about alone with him for choice, her arm round his neck. One day he was sick and started groaning, and his stomach swelled and he went into the thickest part of the laurel bushes and died of poison in half an hour. Mariella came from a French lesson in time to receive his dying look. She thought he reproached her, and her head, fainting in anguish, fell over his, and she said to him: ‘It wasn’t my fault.’ She lay beside him and would not move. The gardener buried him in the evening and she lay on the grave, pale, extinguished and silent. When Judith went home to supper she was still lying there. Nobody saw her cry, and no one ever heard her speak of him again.

She was the one who always picked up naked baby-birds, and worms and frogs and caterpillars. She had a toad which she loved, and she wanted to keep a pet snake. One day she brought one home from the long-grass meadow; but Miss Pim had a faint turn and the grandmother instructed Julian to kill it in the back yard.

Charlie dared her to go three times running through the field with the bull in it, and she did. Charlie wouldn’t. She could walk without a tremor on the bit of the roof that made everyone else feel watery inside; and she delighted in thunderstorms. Her hair crackled with electricity, and if she put her fingers on you you felt a tiny tingling of shock. She was elated and terrifying, standing at the window and smiling among all the flashes and thunder-cracks.

Julian was the one she seemed to like best; but you never knew. She moved among them all with detached undemanding good-humour. Sometimes Judith thought Mariella despised her.

But she was kind too: she made funny jokes to cheer you up after tears. Once Judith heard them whisper: ‘Let’s all run away from Judy’—and they all did. They climbed up the poplar tree at the bottom of the garden and made noises out of it at her, when she came by, pretending not to be looking for them.

She went away and cried under the nursery sofa, hoping to die there before discovery. The darkness had a thick dusty acrid smell, and breathing was difficult. After hours, there were steps in the room; and then Mariella lifted the sofa frill and looked in.

‘Judy, come out. There’s chocolate biscuits for tea.’

With a fresh burst of tears, Judith came.

‘Oo! You do look cry-ey.’ She was dismayed. ‘Shall I try to make you laugh?’

Mariella unbuttoned her frock, stepped out of it and danced grotesquely in her holland knickers. Judith began to giggle and sob at the same time.

‘I’m the fat man,’ said Mariella.

She blew out her cheeks, stuffed a cushion in her knickers and strutted coarsely. That was irresistible. You had to squeal with laughter. After that the others came in rather quietly and were very polite, not looking till her face had stopped being blotched and covering her hiccups with cheerful conversation. And after tea they asked her to choose the game. So everything was all right.

It was autumn, and soon the lawn had a chill smoke-blue mist on it. All the blurred heavy garden was as still as glass, bowed down, folded up into itself, deaf, dumb and blind with secrets. Under the mist the silky river lay flat and flawless, wanly shining. All the colours of sky and earth were thin ghosts of themselves: and on the air were the troubling bitter-sweet odours of decay.

When the children came from hiding in the bushes they looked all damp and tender, with a delicate glow in their faces, and wet lashes, and drops of wet on their hair. Their breath made mist in front of them. They were beautiful and mysterious like the evening.

The happiness was a swelling pressure in the head and chest, too exciting to bear. Going home under the willows in the little connecting pathway between the two gardens Judith suddenly made up some poetry.

Stupid funny serious Martin had red cheeks and brown eyes and dirty knees. His legs were very hairy for his age. He had an extremely kind nature. He was the one they always teased and scored off. Charlie used to say: ‘Let’s think of a sell for Martin,’ and when he had been sold, as he always was, they danced in front of him shouting: ‘Sold again! Sold again!’ He never minded. Sometimes it was Judith who thought of the best sells, which made her proud. She was very cruel to him, but he remained faithful and loving, and occasionally sent her chaotic sheets of dirt and ink from school, signing them: ‘Yrs truly, M. Fyfe.’

He loved Roddy too,—patiently, maternally. Sometimes they went about each with an arm round the other’s neck; and they always chose each other first in picking sides. Judith always prayed Charlie would pick her first, and sometimes he did, but not always.

Martin had coagulated toffee in one pocket and hairy acid drops in the other. He was always eating something. When there was nothing else he ate raw onions and stank to Heaven.

He was the best of them all at running and chucking, and his muscle was his fondest care and pride. What he liked best was to take Roddy or Judith in the canoe and go bird’s nesting up the creek. Roddy did not tease him about Judith—Roddy never cared what other people did enough to tease them about it—but the others were apt to, so he was rather ashamed, and spoke roughly and pushed her in public; and only showed he loved her when they were alone together.

Once there was hide-and-seek and Charlie was he. Martin asked Judith to hide with him. They lay in the orchard, under the hay-stack, with their cheeks pressed into the warm sweet-smelling turf. Judith watched the insects labouring over blades of grass; and Martin watched her.

‘Charlie’s a long time coming,’ said Judith.

‘I don’t think so. Lie still.’

Judith dropped back, rolled over and surveyed him out of the corner of an eye. His face seen so near looked funny and rough and enormous; and she laughed. He said:

‘The grass is wet. Sit on my chest.’

She sat on his hard chest and moved up and down as he breathed. He said:

‘I say, which do you like best of us all?’

‘Oh, Charlie.... But I like you too.’

‘But not as much as Charlie?’

‘Oh no, not as much as Charlie.’

‘Couldn’t you like me as much?’

‘I don’t think so. I like him better than anyone.’

He sighed. She felt a little sorry for him and said:

‘But I like you next best,’ adding to herself, ‘I don’t think’—a sop to God, who was always listening. For it was an untruth. Roddy came next, then Julian, and then Martin. He was so boring and faithful, always following her round and smelling slightly of perspiration and dirt, and so entirely under her thumb that he almost had no part in the mysterious thrillingness of the children next door. She had to think of him in his detached aspects, running faster than anyone else, or diving for things at the bottom of the river before he became part of it: or else she had to remember him with Roddy’s arm flung over his shoulder. That gave him a glamour. It was thrilling to think of being friends with a person—especially with Roddy—to that extent. It was no use praying that Charlie would be willing to walk about like that with her. He would never dream of it.

Charlie was beautiful as a prince. He was fair and tall with long bright golden hair that he tossed back from his forehead, and a pale clear skin. He had a lovely straight white nose, and a girl’s mouth with full lips slightly apart, and a jutting cleft chin. He kept his shirt collar unbuttoned, and the base of his throat showed white as a snowdrop. His knees were very white too. Judith thought of him night and day. At night she pretended he was in bed beside her; she told him stories and sang him to sleep: and he said he liked her better than anyone else and would marry her when they grew up. He went to sleep with a moonbeam across his brow and she watched over him till morning. He fell into awful dangers and she rescued him; he had accidents and she carried him for miles soothing his groans. He was ill and she nursed him, holding his hand through the worst of the delirium.

He called out: ‘Judith! Judith! Why don’t you come?’ and she answered: ‘I am here, darling,’ and he opened his eyes and recognised her and whispered, ‘Stay with me,’ and fell into a peaceful refreshing sleep. And the doctor said, ‘We had all given him up; but your love has pulled him through.’

Then she fell ill herself, worn out with watching and anxiety. Charlie came to her and with tears implored her to live that he might show his gratitude. Sometimes she did; but sometimes she died; and Charlie dedicated his ruined life to her, tending her grave and weeping daily. From the bottom of the grave she looked up and saw him pale and grief-stricken, planting violets.

Nothing in the least like that ever really happened in spite of prayers. He was quite indifferent.

Once she spent the night next door because Mamma and Papa were away and Nurse’s mother was going at last. It seemed too exciting to be true, but it happened. The grandmother said she was Mariella’s little guest, so Mariella showed her the visitors’ lavatory. Charlie met her coming out of it, and passed by politely, pretending not to notice. It was a great pity. She had hoped to appear noble in all her works to him. There was no chance now. It nearly made the visit a failure.

They had a midnight feast of caramels and banana mess which Julian knew how to make because he was at Eton; and next morning Charlie did not come to breakfast and Julian said he had been sick in the night and gone to Grannie. He was always the one to be sick after things. They went up to see him, and he was in bed with a basin beside him, flushed and very cross. He turned to the wall and told them to get out. He spoke to the grandmother in a whining baby voice and would not let her leave him. Julian muttered that he was a spoilt sugar-baby and they all went away again. So the visit was quite a failure. Judith went home pondering.

But next time she saw him he was so beautiful and lordly she had to go on worshipping. Secretly she recognised his faults, but it was no use: she had to worship him.

Once they turned out all the lights and played hide and seek. The darkness in the hall was like crouching enormous black velvet animals. Suddenly Charlie whispered: ‘Come on, let’s look together;’ and his damp hand sought hers and clutched it, and she knew he was afraid of the dark. He pretended he was brave and she the frightened one, but he trembled and would not let go her hand. It was wonderful, touching and protecting him in the dark: it made the blackness lose its terrors. When the lights went on again he was inclined to swagger. But Julian looked at him with his sharp jeering look. He knew.

Julian and Charlie had terrible quarrels. Julian was always quite quiet: only his eyes and tongue snapped and bit. He was dreadfully sarcastic. The quiet things he said lashed and tortured Charlie to screaming frenzies; and he would give a little dry bit of laugh now and then as he observed the boiling up of his brother. Once they fought with croquet mallets on the lawn, and even Mariella was alarmed. And once Charlie picked up an open penknife and flung it. Julian held his hand up. The knife was stuck in the palm. He looked at it heavily, and a haggard sick horror crept over his face and he fainted with a bang on the floor. Everybody thought he was dead. But the grandmother said ‘Nonsense’ when Martin went to her and announced the fatality; and she was right. After she had revived and bandaged him, poor trembling Charlie was sent in to apologise. Later all the others went in, full of awe and reverence, and everybody was rather embarrassed. Charlie was a trifle hysterical and turned somersaults and threw himself about, making noises in his throat. Everybody giggled a lot with the relief, and Julian was very gentle and modest on the sofa. After that Julian and Charlie were better friends and sometimes called each other ‘Old chap.’

Once at a children’s gymkhana that somebody had, Charlie fell down; and when he saw a trickle of blood on his knee he went white and began to whimper. He never could bear blood. Some of the gymkhana children looked mocking and whispered, and Julian came along and told them to shut up, very fiercely. Then he patted Charlie on the back and said: ‘Buck up, old chap,’ and put an arm round him and took him up to the house to be bandaged. Judith watched them going away, pressed close to each other, the backs of their heads and their thin childish shoulders looking lonely and pathetic. She thought suddenly: ‘They’ve no Mother and Father;’ and her throat ached.

Charlie sometimes told you things. Once, after one of the quarrels, chucking pebbles into the river, he said:

‘It’s pretty rotten Julian and me always quarreling.’

‘But it’s his fault, Charlie.’

‘Oh, I dare say it’s just as much mine.’

Magnanimous Charlie.

‘Oh no, he’s so beastly to you. I think he’s a horrid boy.’

‘Rot! What do you know about it?’ he said indignantly. ‘He’s ripping and he’s jolly clever too. Much cleverer than me. He thinks I’m an awful ass.’

‘Oh, you’re not.’

‘Well he thinks so,’ he said gloomily. ‘I expect I am.’

It was terrible to see him so depressed.

‘I don’t think so, Charlie.’ Then fearfully plunging: ‘I wish you were my brother.’

He hurled a pebble, watched it strike the water, got up to go and said charmingly:

‘Well, I wish you were my sister.’

And at once it was clear he did not really mean it. He did not care. He was used to people adoring him, wanting from him what he never gave but always charmingly pretended to give. It was a deep pang in the heart. She cried out inwardly: ‘Ah, you don’t mean it!...’ Yet at the same time there was the melting glow because he had after all said it.

Another time he took a pin out of his coat and said:

‘D’you see what this is?’

‘A pin.’

‘Guess where I found it.’

‘In the seat of your chair.’

The flippancy was misplaced. He ignored it and said impressively:

‘In my pudding at school.’

‘Oh!’

‘I nearly swallowed it.’

‘Oh!’

‘If I had I’d ‘a’ died.’

He stared at her.

‘Oh, Charlie!...’

‘You can keep it if you like.’

He was so beautiful, so gracious, so munificent that words failed....

She put the pin in a sealed envelope and wrote on it. “The pin that nearly killed C.F.” with the date; and laid it away in the washstand drawer with her will and a bit of uncut turquoise, and some shells, and a piece of bark from the poplar tree that fell down in the garden. After that she was a good deal encouraged to hope he might marry her.

Sometimes Charlie and Mariella looked alike—clear, bloodlessly cool; and they both adored dogs and talked a special language to them. But Charlie was all nerve, vulnerable, easy to trouble; and Mariella seemed quite impervious. They disliked each other. He thought she despised him, and it made him nag and try to score off her. Yet they had this subtle likeness.

Sometimes Charlie played the piano for hours. He and Julian remembered tunes in their heads and could play them correctly even if they had only heard them whistled once. If one could not remember a bar, the other could: they supplemented each other. It was thrilling to hear them. They were wrapped in shining mists of glory. When Charlie sang Christmas carols his voice was heart-breakingly sweet and he looked like the little choir boy, too saintly, too blue-eyed to live,—which made Judith anxious. The grandmother used to wipe her eyes when he sang, and say to Judith, just as if she had been grown up, that he was the image of his dear father.

The grandmother did not love Julian in the same way, though sometimes in the evening she would stroke his rough stormy-looking head as he lay on the floor, and say very pityingly: ‘Poor old boy.’ He used to shut his eyes tight when she said it, and let himself be stroked for a minute, then jerk away. He always did things twice as vehemently as other people. He never shut his eyes without screwing them up. At first you thought he was just beastly, but later you found he was pathetic as well and knew why she said: ‘Poor old boy’ with that particular inflection. Later still you varied hating him with almost loving him.

Judith was the only one he never mocked at. She was quite immune. He did not always take notice of her, of course, being at Eton, and she much younger; but when he did, he was always kindly—even interested; so that it seemed unjust to dislike him so much, except for Charlie’s sake.

He was an uncomfortable person. If you had been alone with him it was a relief to get back to the others. His senses were too acute, his mind too angular. He would not let anything alone. He was always prying and poking restlessly, testing and examining, and making you do the same, insistently holding your attention as long as he wanted it, so that his company was quite exhausting. He always hoped to find people more intelligent, more interesting than they were, and he would not let them alone till he had discovered their inadequacy and thrown them away.

But the more he poked at a person’s mind, the more that person withdrew. He had that knack. He spent his time doing himself no good, repelling where he hoped to attract. He was of a didactical turn of mind. He loved instructing; and he knew so much about his subjects and was so anxious to impart all he knew that he would go on and on and on. It was very tiresome. Judith was too polite to show her boredom, so she got a lot of instruction. Sometimes he tried when they were alone together to make her tell him her thoughts, which would have been terribly embarrassing but that he soon lost interest in them and turned to his own. He himself had a great many thoughts which he threw at her pell mell. He had contemptuous ideas about religion. He had just become an unbeliever, and he said ‘God’ in quite an ordinary unashamed conversational voice. Sometimes she understood his thoughts, or pretended to, to save the explanation, and sometimes she let him explain, because it made him so pleased and enthusiastic. He would contort himself all over with agony searching for the right, the perfect words in which to express himself, and if he was satisfied at the end he hummed a little tune. He loved words passionately: he invented very good ones. Also he made the most screamingly funny monstrous faces to amuse them all, if he felt cheerful. Generally however, he was morose when they were all together, and went away alone, looking as if he despised and distrusted them. Judith discovered he did not really prefer to be alone: he liked one other person, a listener. It made him light up impetuously and talk and talk. The others thought him conceited, and he was; yet all the time he was less conceited than self-abasing and sensitive, less overbearing than diffident. He could not laugh at himself, only at others; and he never forgave a person who laughed at him.

He told untruths to a disconcerting extent. Judith told a great many herself, so she was very quick to detect his, and always extremely shocked. Once the grandmother said:

‘Who broke the punt pole?’

And they all said:

‘I didn’t.’

Then she said patiently:

‘Well, who went punting yesterday?’ And Martin, red and anxious with his desire to conceal nothing cried joyfully: ‘I did.’—adding almost with disappointment: ‘But I didn’t break the pole.’ His truthfulness was quite painfully evident. Nobody had broken the pole.

Julian whistled carelessly for a bit after that, so Judith knew.

Sometimes he invented dreams, pretending he had really dreamt them. Judith always guessed when the dreams were untruths, though often they were very clever and absurd, just like real dreams. She made up dreams too, so he could not deceive her. She knew the recipe for the game; and that, try as you would, some betraying touch was bound to creep in.

In the same way he could not deceive her about the adventures he had had, the queer people he had met, plausible as they were. Made-up people were real enough, but only in their own worlds, which were each as different from the world your body lived in as the people who made them were different from each other. The others always believed him when they bothered to listen; they had not the imagination to find him out. Judith as a fellow artist was forced to judge his lies intellectually, in spite of moral indignation.

He was rather mean about sweets. Often he bought a bagful of acid drops, and after handing them round once went away and finished them by himself. Sometimes when Judith was with him he sucked away and never once said: ‘Have one.’ But another time he bought her eightpence worth all to herself and took her for a beetle walk. He adored beetles. He knew their names in Latin, and exactly how many thousand eggs a minute they laid and what they ate, and where and how long they lived. Coming back he put his arm round her and she was proud, though she wished he were Charlie.

He read a lot and sometimes he was secretive about it. He stayed in the bath room whole afternoons reading dictionaries or the Arabian Nights.

He was the only one who was said to know for certain how babies were born. When the others aired their theories he laughed in a superior way. Then one day after they had all been persuading him he said, surly and brief: ‘Well, haven’t you noticed animals, idiots?’ And after they had consulted amongst themselves a bit they all thought they understood, except Martin, and Marietta had to explain to him.

Julian played the piano better than Charlie; he played so that it was impossible not to listen. But he was not, as Charlie was, a pure vessel for receiving music and pouring it forth again. Judith thought Charlie undoubtedly lapped up music as a kitten lapped milk.

Julian said privately that he intended to write an opera. It was too thrilling for words. He had already composed a lovely thing called ‘Spring’ with trills, and an imitation of a cuckoo recurring in it. It was wonderful,—exactly like a real cuckoo. Another composition was called ‘The Dance of the Stag-Beetles.’ That was very funny. You simply saw the stag-beetles lumping solemnly round. It made everybody laugh—even the grandmother. Then Roddy invented a dance for it which was as funny as the music; and it became a regular thing to be done on rainy days. Julian himself preferred ‘Spring.’ He said it was a bigger thing altogether.

Roddy was the queerest little boy. He was the most unreal and thrilling of all because he was there so rarely. His parents were not dead like Julian’s and Charlie’s, or abroad like Martin’s or divorced and disgraced like Mariella’s. (Mariella’s mother had run away with a Russian Pole, whatever that was, when Mariella was a baby; and after that her father ... there Nurse had broken off impressively and tilted an imaginary bottle to her lips when she was whispering about it to the housemaid.)

Roddy’s parents lived in London and allowed him to come on a week’s visit once every holiday. Roddy scarcely ever spoke. He had a pale, flat secret face and yellow-brown eyes with a twinkling light remote at the back of them. He had a ruffled dark shining head and a queer smile that you watched for because it was not like anyone else’s. His lip lifted suddenly off his white teeth and then turned down at the corners in a bitter-sweet way. When you saw it you said ‘Ah!’ to yourself, with a little pang, and stared,—it was so queer. He had a trick of spreading out his hands and looking at them,—brown broad hands with long crooked fingers that were magical when they held a pencil and could draw anything. He had another trick of rubbing his eyes with his fist like a baby, and that made you say ‘Ah!’ too, with a melting, quick sort of pang, wanting to touch him. His eyes fluttered in a strong light: they were weak and set so far apart that, with their upward sweep, they seemed to go round the corners and, seen in profile, to be set in his head like a funny bird’s. He reminded you of something fabulous—a Chinese fairy-story. He was thin and odd and graceful; and there was a suggestion about him of secret animals that go about by night.

Once Judith saw a hawthorn hedge in winter, shining darkly with recent rain. Deep in the heart of its strong maze of twigs moved a shadowy bird pecking, darting silently about in its small mysterious confined loneliness after a glowing berry or two. Suddenly Judith thought of Roddy. It was ridiculous of course, but there it was: the suggestion came of itself with the same queer pull of surprise and tenderness. A noiseless, intent creature moving alone among small brilliancies in a profound maze: there was—oh, what was there that was all of Roddy in that?

He was so elastic, so mercurial in his movements, when he chose, that he did not seem true. He had a way of swinging down from the topmost branch of a tree, dropping lightly, hand below hand, as if he were floating down, and then, long before he reached the usual jumping-place, giving himself easily to the air and landing in a soft relaxed cat-like crouch.

Once they set out to attempt the huge old fir-tree at the edge of the garden. The thing was to get to the top before someone below counted fifty. Julian, Mariella, Martin tried, and failed. Then Roddy. He swung himself up and soon after leapt out from a branch and came down again, pronouncing it too uncomfortable and filthy to be bothered about. Judith looked up and saw the wild swirl of twigs so thick all the way up that no sky showed through. She said to herself: ‘I will! I will!’ and the Spirit entered in to her and she climbed to the top and threw a handkerchief out of it just as Martin said fifty-seven. After that she came down again, and received congratulations. Martin gave her his lucky thripenny as a prize, and she was swollen with pride because she, the youngest, had beaten them all; and in her exaltation she thought: ‘I can do anything if I say I can,’ and tried again that evening to fly through the power of faith but failed.

Afterwards when she was resavouring in secret the sweet applause they had given her she remembered that Roddy had said nothing,—just looked at her with twinkling eyes and a bit of his downward smile; and she thought he had probably been laughing at her for her enthusiasm and her pride. She felt disillusioned, and all at once remembered her bruises and her ruined bloomers.

Roddy had no ambition. He did not feel at all humiliated if he failed to meet a challenge. If he did not want to try he did not try: not because he was afraid of failing, for he knew his power and so did everyone else; and not because he was physically cautious, for fear was unknown to him: it was because of the fundamental apathy in him. He lived in bursts of energy followed by the most lethargic indifference.

When he chose to lead they all followed; but he did not care. He did not care whether he was liked or not. He never sought out Martin, though he accepted his devotion kindly and did not join in the sells arranged for him. But then he never joined in anything: he was not interested in personal relationships.

They were all a little afraid of him, and none of them—except Martin to whom he was as a son—liked him very much.

The things he drew were extremely odd: long dream-like figures with thin legs trailing after them, giants and pigmies and people having their heads cut off, and ghosts and skeletons rising from graves and flapping after children; and people doing wild dances, their limbs flying about; and amusing monsters and hideous terrifying old women. His caricatures were the best. The grandmother said they were very promising. Julian was always the most successful subject, and he minded dreadfully.

Sometimes Judith sat beside him and watched his quick pencil. It was like magic. But always he soon gave up. He had scarcely any interest in his drawings once they were finished. She collected them in sheaves and took them home to gloat over. That he could execute such things and that she should be privileged to observe and to gather up after him!... His drawings were more thrilling even than the music of Julian and Charlie. She could play the piano herself quite nicely, but as for drawing,—there was another clear case of the unreliability of the Bible. However much you cried: ‘I can, I can!’ and rushed, full of faith, to pencil and paper, nothing whatever happened.

Once she was suddenly emboldened and said out loud the words rehearsed silently for many weeks,

‘Now draw something for me, Roddy.’

Oh, something designed from its conception for your very own,—something which could be labelled (by yourself, since Roddy would certainly refuse) ‘From the artist to Judith Earle,’ with the date: a token, a perpetual memorial of his friendship!...

‘Oh no,’ said Roddy, ‘I can’t.’ He threw down his pencil, instantly bored at the suggestion, smiled and presently wandered off.

The smile took the edge off the sting, but there was an old feeling, an oppression, as she watched him going away. It was no use trying to bring Roddy out of his labyrinthine seclusion with personal advances and pretensions to favouritism. Roddy had a power to wound far beyond his years; he seemed grown up sometimes in his crushingness.

Now and again he was very funny and invented dances on the lawn to make them laugh. His imitation of a Russian ballet-dancer was wonderful. Also he could walk on his hands or do backward somersaults into the water. This was very thrilling and made him highly respected.

Once he and Judith were the two hares in a paper chase. Roddy spied an old umbrella in the hedge and picked it up. It was tattered and gaunt and huge; and there was something friendly about it,—a disreputable reckless jollity. He carried it for a long time, swinging it round and round, and sometimes balancing it on his chin or spearing things with it. At the top of the hill they came to the pond covered with green stuff and a white starry froth of flowers. All around grew flags and forget-me-nots, and the hundred other rare enchanting trivialities of watery places.

‘Well, I don’t want this old umbrella,’ said Roddy. He considered the water. ‘Do you?’

‘No. Throw it away.’

He flung it. It alighted in the middle of the pond. It stuck—oh, horror!—upright, caught in something, and refused to sink.

‘Oh, Roddy!’

It stared at them across the waste of waters, stark, forlorn, reproachful. It said: ‘Why did you pick me up, encourage and befriend me when this is what you meant to do?’

‘Well, come on,’ said Roddy.

They fled from it.

They fled from it, but ah!—it pursued them. From miles away it wailed to Judith in a high thin squeak: ‘Save me! Save me!’ They made excuses to each other for spoiling the paper chase, and going back the same way. Their feet were compelled, driven.

The pond lay fair and flawless in the evening light. The umbrella was drowned.

Roddy stood at the edge and bit his lip. He said:

‘Well, I almost wish I hadn’t thrown the poor old chap away.’

She nodded. She could not speak.

The place was haunted for ever.

But what remained more deeply in her memory was the bond with Roddy, the sharing of an emotion, the secret sympathy. Avidly she seized upon it, and with it nourished her immoderate ambitions. One day they would all like her better than anyone else: even Roddy would tell her every thing. Their lives, instead of being always remote and mysterious would revolve intimately round her. She would know all, all about them.

From that far off unsubstantial time Roddy’s face was the last, the clearest, the strangest to float up.

There was a field with chalky pits in it and ripening blackberries and wastes of gorse and bracken. The curious smell of the bracken rose faint but penetrating, earthy and yet unreal, disturbing.

She was staring in horror at a dead rabbit lying in the path. It was stretched on its side with its tiny frail-boned paws laid out quiet, and the tender secret white fur of its underneath half revealed. One of them—which?—she could never remember—said:

‘Well, I never thought I’d touch it.’

It was like hearing a person speak in a bad dream.

‘How did you do it?’ said Roddy’s voice.

‘Well, it was sitting, and I crept up and chucked a stone to startle it up, not meaning to hurt it. But I must have hit it plumb behind the ear,—I killed it outright anyway. It was an absolute fluke. I couldn’t do it again if I tried all my life.’

‘Hum,’ said Roddy. ‘Funny thing.’

He stood with his hands in his pockets looking down at the corpse, making his face a mask. The sun wavered and darkened. The surface of the bracken shone with a metallic light, the grass was lurid, the trees hissed. Judith struggled in a nightmare.

‘Well, what shall I do with it?’ said someone.

‘I’ll see to it,’ said Roddy.

Then he and she were alone. She bent down and touched the fur. It was dead, it was dead. She fell on her knees beside it and wept.

‘I say, don’t,’ said Roddy after a bit. He could not bear tears.

She wept all the more, awful sobs from the pit of the stomach.

‘He didn’t mean it, it can’t be helped,’ said Roddy. Then after another interval:

‘You know, it didn’t feel it. It died at once.’

It died at once. Oh, how pathetic, how unbearable.... Then again, after a long time:

‘Look, we’ll take it home and give it a funeral.’

He gathered huge fern-leaves and gently wrapped the rabbit in them. She picked it up: she would carry it, though she almost fainted with anguish at the feel of its tender thin body. She thought: ‘I am holding something that’s dead. It was alive a few minutes ago and now it’s—what is it?’—and she felt choked, drowning.

They set off. Weeping, weeping she carried the rabbit down the hill into the garden; and Roddy walked silently beside her. He went away and dug a hole under a laurel bush in the thickest part of the shrubbery. But when it came to the final act, the burying, she could not bear it at all. She was beyond all coherence now, a welter of sobs and tears.

‘I say, don’t,’ said Roddy again in a shaking voice.

She was suddenly quiet with shock; for he sounded on the verge of breaking down. He could not endure her grief. Out of the corner of a sodden eye she saw his face start to break up. Quickly she yielded the body, and he took it away.

He was gone a long time. When he came back he took her arm and said:

‘Come and look.’

Under the laurel bush, at the head of the little mound he had set up a beautiful tablet. It was the top of a cake tin, smooth and clean and shining; and on it he had hammered out with a nail the words: ‘In memory of a Rabbit.’

Peace and comfort flowed in upon her....

The rabbit was under all that quiet and green gloom, under the chill stiff polished moulding of the great laurel leaves, no longer terrible and pathetic, but dignified with its memorial tablet, lapped in the kind protecting earth, out of reach of flies and boys and the mocking stare of the sun. It was all right. There was not any sorrow.

‘Oh, Roddy!’

He had done it to please her. Charlie would not have done it, Martin could not have. It was a purely Roddy gesture, so unlike him, you would have supposed, and yet, when it was done, so recognisably his gesture and only his. Incalculable Roddy! She remembered how when Martin had sprained his ankle and moaned, he had hovered round him in distress, with a puckered face. He could not stand the unhappiness and pain of people.

She wanted to kiss him, and did not dare. She looked at him, the whole of herself flowing towards him in a warm tumult of gratitude, and quickly touched his arm; and he looked back, withdrawing himself for fear of thanks, smiling his obscure downward smile. She thought: ‘Shall I never, never understand him?’

She saw the sky beginning to blossom with evening. The sun came out below flushed clouds and all the treetops were lit up, sombrely floating and rocking in a dark gold wash of light. Across the river the fields looked rich and wistful, brimming with sun, cut with long violet shadows. The river ran a little wildly, scattered over with fierce, fire-opal flakes. But all was softening, flattering. The clouds were drifting away, the wind was quiet now; there would be an evening as still, as carved as death.

She saw it all with the quivering overclear senses of exhaustion. It was too much. Roddy’s pale face was all at once significant, and all the others, even Charlie, floated away while she looked at him and loved him. And as she looked she saw the deep light falling on him and he seemed mingled with the whole mysterious goldenness of the evening, to be part of it; and she felt herself lost with him in a sudden dark poignant intimacy and merging,—a lifting flood, all come and gone in a timeless moment.

But afterwards it did not seem true. She only remembered that next time she saw him he had been quite ordinary and indifferent, and she herself, still looking for signs and wonders, chilled with disappointment. Roddy as a child grew dim after that; and the rabbit’s grave that she had meant to tend and keep sweet with flowers through the changing seasons, grew dim too. After a while she could not even remember exactly where it was in all that shrubbery. The rabbit lay forgotten.

The others faded too. She could recapture nothing more of them. They were cut off sharp in a final group on the hillside, as if horror had in that instant made a night and blotted them out for good.

Then the grandmother let the house and went away to seek a less damp air for her rheumatism. Being alone came again as the natural stuff of life, and the children next door were gone and lost, as if they had never been.