“I did not mean it like that”; the woman stopped short as if a hand had been put rudely before her mouth.
Night was pouring slowly into the sunshine room. They could not see each other’s faces when Thomas began suddenly to listen; he seemed to hear suppressed sobs.... No, it was imagination; his wife never cried. They had been silent for such a long time that Anne had merely fallen asleep in the corner of the couch. Illey rose and closed the door noiselessly behind him.
During Anne’s illness Thomas had moved from the common bedroom into the back room which had once belonged to Ulwing the builder. When she improved, he did not himself know why, he remained there. His wife did not oppose it and he was fond of the room. From the window he could touch the leaves of the chestnut tree and after rain the smell of the damp earth in the garden reached him.
He sat on the window sill. Outside, the trees whispered.
Thomas’s mind was gone from among the closed walls. Desire carried his soul beyond the town. He strolled alone and was met by a breeze smelling of rain. How he loved that! How he loved everything out of doors: the smells, the colours, the sounds, the steaming bogs of boiling summer, the frozen roads of winter, where one’s footsteps ring and the branches crack as they fall. Then the wind rises from the soughing reeds and life trembles over the world. In the furrows, the water soaks into the ground. The wood resounds with the amorous complaint of birds. Call ... answer. Do they always find their mate?
In his heart Thomas nearly felt the silence of the woods. The seed of reproduction falls in this trembling, solemn peace. Birds float slowly in the sunshine. When the hour of the crops comes, summer is there. Harvest is in full swing everywhere and his blood is haunted with inherited memories. How often, how often, he has stopped at the edge of somebody else’s wheat-field and clenched his fist. Nowhere in the world is anything growing for him.
This memory brought sad autumn weather to his mind. A deep sad fall ... and he comes in a mist towards the town. He comes like an escaped convict brought back to his prison. Again the paved streets and narrow strips of smoky sky. Office, blotches of ink, paper and the old house, which is strange to him, and the lovely cold woman who does not understand him.
Dim recollections stole upon him. Again he seemed to feel Anne’s two little protesting hands on his breast and that unsympathetic look which had more than once repelled his desire.
He stretched his hand out of the window towards the chestnut tree. He picked a young shoot. The bough yielded itself easily, moist, fresh....
He thought of someone who had yielded herself as easily as the young shoot. She had been bred there on his old land, the daughter of the keeper in the swampy wood. Humble, as the former serf-girls had been with his ancestors, pretty too, with laughing eyes. She never asked what her master was brooding about, and yet she knew. The woods, the meadows, she too thought of them and she sang of them with the very voice of the earth. One did not need to listen, one could whistle, she expected no praise. No more do the birds....