1
THEY were coming back. When she knew this she dared not venture beyond the garden for fear of encountering them unexpectedly. Only the dark was safe; and night after sleepless night she jumped out of the kitchen window into the garden, and crossed the lawn’s pattern of long tree-shadows, sharp-cut upon the blank moon-blanched level of the grass. All the colours were drained away; only the white spring flowers in the border shone up with a glimmer as of phosphorus, and the budding tree-tops were picked out, line by cold line, in a thin and silvery wash of light.
She went dancingly down the garden, feeling moon-changed, powerful and elated; and paused at the river’s edge. The water shone mildly as it flowed. She scanned it up and down; it was deserted utterly, it was hers alone. She took off her few clothes and stepped in, dipping rapidly; and the water slipped over her breasts, round her shoulders, covering all her body. The chill water wounded her; her breath came shudderingly, in great gasps; but after a moment she started to swim vigorously downstream. It was exquisite joy to be naked in the water’s sharp clasp. In comparison, the happiness of swimming in a bathing suit was vulgar and contemptible. To swim by moonlight alone was a sacred and passionate mystery. The water was in love with her body. She gave herself to it with reluctance and it embraced her bitterly. She endured it, soon she desired it; she was in love with it. Gradually its harshness was appeased, and it held her and caressed her gently in her motion.
Soon next door loomed lightless among its trees. If they were there, they were all sleeping. No eyes would be staring in the darkness, gazing at the enchanted water, wondering at the dark object moving upon its surface.
But no, they had not come yet: the moon came from behind a cloud and illumined the face of the great house; and it was grief-stricken as ever, bowed down with the burden of its emptiness. She turned back and swam home.
The night of full moon came, warm and starry. As she swam towards the willows at the far edge of the next-door garden,—her usual goal—she saw lights in the windows. The long house spread itself peacefully under the moon, throwing out its muffled warmth of lamplight like a quiet smile.
So they had come.
Somebody might be in the garden,—on the river even. She clung close under the bank, by a willow stump, not daring to move, feeling her strength ebb from her.
Then all at once their forms, their voices were near her. Somebody started to play a nocturne of Fauré: Julian. Before her she saw someone tall, in a pale frock, walking along the lawn: Mariella. A moment after a man’s figure came from the shadows and joined hers. Which was he? The twin glow of their cigarettes went ahead of them as they paced slowly, arm in arm, across the lawn, just as Charlie and Mariella had often paced in the dreams.
They were so near they must in a moment look down and see her; but they passed on a few steps and then paused, looking out over the river, and up at the resplendent moon. The piano stopped, and soon another figure came and joined them. They were three tall shadows: their faces were indistinguishable.
‘Hullo!’ said the small clear unchanged voice of Mariella, ‘I can’t understand your music, Julian. Nor can Martin, can you, Martin?’
‘Well it’s so damned dull. No tune in it.’
Julian’s brief laugh came for answer.
It was like all the dreams to listen to these voices dropping, muted but distinct, from invisible lips close to you in the dark, saying trivial things that seemed important because of the strangeness and surprise of the meeting.
‘Why don’t you,’ said Martin, ‘play nice simple wholesome things that we can have on the brain and hum and whistle all day?’
‘I’m not simple and wholesome enough to do them justice. I leave them to your masterly right index, Martin.’
‘Martin’s the world’s finest one-finger man, aren’t you?’ from Mariella, teasing, affectionate.
‘Where’s Roddy?’
‘He went off alone in the canoe.’
‘How romantic,’ said Mariella.
There was a groan.
‘Mariella, why will you——’
‘What?’
‘Quack,’ said Julian. ‘You must think before you speak.’
She laughed.
‘Good-night,’ she said. ‘I’m going to bed. When you come upstairs mind and be quiet past the nursery. Remember it’s not your nursery but Peter’s now. Nannie’ll warm your jacket if you wake him again, Martin.’
Her cigarette end hit the water a few inches from Judith. Her whitish form grew dim and was gone.
‘What a night!’ said Julian, after a silence. ‘The moon is a most theatrical designer.’
The two strolled on,—none too soon, for the water was glacial to her cramped body, her fingers were rigid upon the willow-roots, and her teeth were rattling in her head.
She heard from Martin:
‘When I was in Paris with Roddy——’
And then after a long pause, Julian’s voice suddenly raised: ‘But what if you bored yourself ... day after day ... to myself: Christ! You bloody bore....’
The voices sank into confusion and ceased; but in the ensuing silence they seemed to follow her and repeat themselves, charged with the portentous significance of all overheard fragments of speech; so that she felt herself guiltily possessed of the secrets of their hearts.
The moon shone full on the garden bank when she lifted herself out, exhausted, and lay down on the grass.
Around her the shadows stood still. Her body in the moonlight was transfigured into lines of such mysterious purity that it seemed composed less of flesh than of light. She thought: “Even if they had seen me they wouldn’t have thought me real.”... Martin would have been astonished if not shocked; he would have turned politely away, but Julian would have appraised her curves, critically and with interest. And Roddy,—Roddy was so long ago he was incalculable. But if that someone dark and curious, with Roddy’s face, cherished for years in the part of you which perceived without eyes and knew without reason,—if he had seen, he would have watched closely, and then withdrawn himself from the seduction, from the inconvenience of his own pang; and watched from afar, in silence.
“Oh, Roddy, when will you come and reveal yourself?”
The swim home had warmed her, but now, in spite of excited pulses, she felt the cold beginning to strike deeply. She got up and stood still a moment: soon she must hide her silver-white body in the cloak, and then it would cease to be a miracle.
As she stooped for the garment, she heard the long soft ripple and plash of a paddle; a canoe stole into view, floating down full in the middle of the stream. She gathered her dark cape round her and stepped back into the shadows; and as she watched the solitary figure in the stern she forgot to breathe.
‘Oh, turn! Oh, turn!’ she sent after him silently.
But if he did she would dissolve, be swallowed up....
He did not turn his head; and she watched him go on, past the next-door garden and still onward;—going on all night perhaps....
If only he had seen her he would have beckoned to her.
‘Judith, come with me.’
‘I will.’
And all night they would have floated on together.
Some day it would happen: it must. She had always known that the play of Roddy must be written and that she must act in it to the end—the happy end.
‘Oh, Roddy, I am going to love you.’
The diminishing, unresponsive blot which was he passed out of sight.
Half way back to the house she stopped suddenly, overcome with bewilderment; for that had been Roddy’s self, not his shadow made by the imagination. The solitudes of the darkness now held their very forms, were mysterious with their voices where for so long only imagined shapes had hovered in the emptiness.... They had slipped back in that lucid, credulous life between waking and sleep out of which you start to ponder whether the dream was after all reality—or whether reality be nothing but a dream.