“Yes, I can,” she said, low-voiced.
“Wish I could.” He paused, expectant, listening, till all the tiny myriad noises that make up silence disintegrated once more. He could hear the tinkle of the brook three fields away, and the croak of its frogs, and the dry whisper of crickets in the flowery grass. Somewhere in the valley a train roared and was gone again, brief in its passage as a shooting star, and at his ear a mosquito hummed by like an echo. The metallic strains of the village gramophone, twanging out rag-time, reached him, all silvered over by the distance, and he felt himself thrill absurdly to the thin, sweet sounds. Before him lay the grey, silent garden and the black velvet of the motionless woods, but a poplar on the lawn was faintly murmurous, like a child sighing in its sleep. Overhead the bats wheeled and glimmered with threadlike cheepings.
He was suddenly aware of his own enormous restlessness. A muscle in his throat was throbbing hotly: he felt thirsty and unhappy, and resentful of the quiet night and the quiet woman at his side who did not help him to he knew not what. He turned impatiently.
“No. There’s only us! June indeed! Come on in. It’s getting late. How cold your fingers are——”
From a near copse an owl hooted derisively.
CHAPTER XXVII
‘If’ is the pivot of existence.
If Justin had stayed in the garden with Laura—if the curate had found it pleasanter to make a fourth at bridge than to flirt with Annabel Moulde—if Laura had been a year or two older and a decade or two wiser, old enough to diagnose Justin’s symptoms, wise enough to heal him at the right moment with the right word—if Justin had been scientifically interested rather than humanly annoyed by this new disturbing state of mind of his—then it would not have degenerated from significant malaise into mere bad temper, he would not have been rude to Aunt Adela, Annabel Moulde would not have laughed, and you, Collaborator, could have been assured your happy ending.
If Justin had stayed in the garden——