4
The lecture room window-pane was full of treetops—a whirl and sweep of black twigs on the sky. The room swam and shone in a faint translucent flood; and a bird called on three wild enquiring notes. These skies of February twilights had primroses in them, and floods; and with the primroses, a thought of green.
The small creakings, breathings and shufflings of the lecture room went on. The men: rows of heads of young looking hair; bored restless shoulders hunched beneath their gowns; sprawling grey flannel legs. The women: attentive rather anxious faces under their injudicious hats; well-behaved backs; hands writing, writing. Clods, all of them, stones, worse than senseless things.
The lecturer thought smoothly aloud, not caring who besides himself listened to him.
It was a situation meet for one of those paragraphic poems beginning
“The solemn greybeard lecturer drones on;”
and after a few more lines of subtly satirical description some dots and a fresh start:
“Sudden a blackbird calls.... Ah sweet! Who heeds?”
No one heeds. Attention to greybeards has made everyone insensible to blackbirds. The conclusion would develop neatly along those lines.
A year or two ago, how fervently you would have written, how complacently desired to publish that sort of thing! No regret could be quite so sickly as that with which one wished out of existence the published record of last year’s errors of taste.
‘My dear, he’s the sort of person who’d make arrangements to have his juvenilia published after his death.’
That was the sort of condemnatory label Tony and his friends would attach, spreading their hands, leaving it at that.
‘Oh, Roddy, where are you? Why do you never come?’
He flashed into mind,—leaning idly against the mantelpiece, listening with an obscure smile to Tony’s conversation.
It was the sort of evening on which anything might happen. Excitement took her suddenly by the throat and made her feeble and tingling to her finger-tips.
The last of the light fell lingeringly on the grey stone window-frame. If the gold bloom lasted till you counted fifty, it would be a good omen. One, two, three, four and so on to twenty, thirty, forty ... crushing the temptation to count faster than her own heartbeats ... forty-five ... fifty.
It was still there, vanishing softly, but with a margin of at least another twenty to spare.
The ecstasy grew, making her stomach feel drained and helpless and beating in odd pulses all over her.
She bent over the desk, pretending to write, and making shaky pencil marks.
Somebody got up and switched on the light; and all at once darkness had fallen outside, and the window-pane was a purple-blue blank.
Roddy was in Tony’s room, leaning against the mantelpiece, quite near. She would pass Tony’s staircase on her way out: it was the one in the corner, facing the Chapel. She had seen his name every time she went by. Once she had met him coming out of the doorway, and he had looked through her; and once as she passed, someone in the court had shouted ‘Tony’! and he had leaned from his high window to reply.
Oh, this intolerable lecture!
Suddenly it was over. She came out and saw the bulk of King’s Chapel in the deep twilight with its row of buttresses rising up pale, like giant ghosts.
‘Oh, I’ve left my essay behind in the lecture room. I must go back. Don’t wait for me.’
She went back a few steps until the gloom had swallowed them, and waited alone in the dark court. There was a light in Tony’s window. Lingeringly she crept towards it and paused beneath it, stroking the wall. She lifted her head and cried speechlessly: ‘Oh come! Come!’
Nobody came and looked out through the uncurtained pane. Nobody came running down the stairs.
And if she did not go on quickly the bus would start without her.
Let it start and then walk up and knock on Tony’s door and say quite simply:
“I’ve missed my bus, so I’ve come to see Roddy.” Roddy would spring forward to greet her. All would be made right with Tony.
For a moment that seemed the clear, delightful inevitable solution.
But what would their faces hide from her or betray? What unbearable amusement, suspicion, astonishment, contempt?
And what was there to do on such a night save to say to Roddy: “I love you,” and then go away again? To dare everything, run to him and cry:
I am Lazarus come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I will tell you all.
But what if he should answer with that disastrous answer:
That is not what I meant at all,
That is not it, at all.
If he were to stare and coldly reply, with real speech:
‘Are you mad?’
Oh, but it should be risked!...
She stood still, hesitating, her hand pressing the wall, power and intoxication dying out of her. She felt the night cold and damp, and heard approaching footsteps, a torn fragment of laughter, a male voice raised for a moment in the distance.
She looked up once more at Tony’s window and saw that the curtains had been drawn; and she sprang away from the wall and ran towards the street in urgent flight from her wound, from the deliberate-seeming insult, the cruelty of drawn curtains.
The college bus was packed with girls. Heads were craning out in search of her.
‘Oh, Judy! There you are! We’ve been keeping the bus and keeping it. What on earth happened to you?’
‘I couldn’t get in. The room was locked. And then—Oh dear, I’ve run so! Is there room for me?’
‘Yes, here. Come on, Judy. Here. Come and sit down. You’re all out of breath. Come in.’
They welcomed her. Their little voices and gestures seemed to stroke and pat. They were so glad she had come in time, so considerate and kindly, so safe.
The bus rolled through the streets, past where the solemn lamps and the buildings ended, out on to the road where was only the enveloping night wind. The bus swayed and the rows of bodies swayed and the faces smiled faintly across at each other, amused at their own shaking and jerking; but all half-dreaming, half-hypnotized by the noise and the motion; all warm, languid, silent.
The noise and the motion and the swaying faces seemed eternal. Nothing else had ever been, would ever be. Of course Roddy had not been there: he had never been there at all.