“I don’t know whether I said that. George ... don’t let’s be like other people. Does it matter?”
They stood together and the crickets shouted, rattled tiny feet of approval on the floor of the dunes like a gallery of young Shelleys. The whole night was one immense rhythm; up the gully from the beach came a slow vibration of surf. She was weak with the question in her blood, her knees felt empty. Perhaps that’s where your morality is kept, in the knees, she thought. She slipped her arms under his coat, round the hard strong case of his ribs, to keep from tottering. The tobacco smell of his lapel was infinitely precious and pathetic.
“How do I know what matters?” he whispered. “We can wait and see. If it’s important, the time will come. But I want you to know, my love for you is complete. It wants everything. Can’t you hear the whole world singing it? Everything, everything, everything.”
“I don’t like the crickets. They’re trying to get us into trouble.”
Everything is so queer this evening, she thought. How did all this happen? I’m frightened.
“We’ve always been different from other people,” she said. “We’re absurd and pitiful and impossible. Don’t let’s spoil it, let’s just be us.”
His arms held her more gently. For love is beyond mere desire: it is utter tenderness and pity. Sing, world, sing: here are your children caught in the chorus of that old, old music; here are Food and Hunger that meet only to cancel and expire. Here, cries Nature in her deepest diapason, here are my bread and wine. Too great to be accused of blasphemy, she shames not to borrow the words of man’s noblest fancy. Take, eat, she cries to the famished. This is my body which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me. And her children, conscious of lowly birth, can rise to denials her old easy breast never dreamed.
“George,” said Joyce quickly, “is any one watching ... listening to us? I’ve had the strangest feeling. As though someone was trying to tell me something, calling me.”
“A singing in your nose, perhaps.”
“No, but really.”