The post-girl

by Edward Charles Booth

And they urge each other to fresh helpings of the dried seed-cake, that probably began its public career last Bank Holiday; and partake of the fly-blown cheese-cakes, so great is their exaltation. At times too, those necessary words are almost upon the Spawer's lips. The moment seems propitious. Only let him swallow this mouthful, and he will tell her ... he will say to her:

"Dear girl..."

Then the Dear Girl smiles, or the Dear Girl turns her head, or the Dear Girl forestalls his words with words infinitely more desirable, or catches his eye, and sends it back with as guilty a feeling as though he were a top-story lodger trying to sneak down the staircase for a bucket of coal, and intercepted with his nose at the door and the bucket in his hand.

CHAPTER XIX

And meanwhile, as he removed himself more completely from the girl by resolve, they came closer to each other in spirit. At the piano against the window, looking out upon a poultry-run and the profile of three meagre swing-boats, the Spawer sat down and made music, and the music—even from this cracked, tin-plate, pot-house piano—seemed to sum up all the goodness, all the charity, all the kindness, all the happiness of the day; give it a pure and hallowed expression, as the night's thanksgiving prayer gives blessed articulation to the hidden processes of the soul. It was a mantle, this music that the Spawer made, enfolded about them both. Their two lives, at this moment, were silver streams of content, that met in melodious estuary, and flowed henceforth with one broad current towards the infinite.

Ah! Dangerous state of exaltation this, when souls seem severed from the body, and feel no clog of their fleshy burthens binding them to sordid earth. When spirits are so emancipated from the material that a breath can almost blow them; when life seems to have lost all root in worldly soil, but is merely the blessed sweet odor, hovering above the blossom of existence. While the Spawer played the sky deepened. It seemed to descend like a beneficent angel from heaven and clasp the swing-boats in a celestial embrace, so that they slumbered with the deep peace that comes from above. Pallid harvest stars opened places for themselves in the curtain of blue dusk and peeped down upon the scene. Night threw down her lawny veil of mist, that wound the world dreamily in its filmy folds and hid the realities of existence. The life of toil and labor, the life of matter and the life of fact—these lives were no more, they were merged in a delightful life of dreams. To think was to do. Activity was merely a beautiful unfolding of the soul, delivered of all gross physical exertion, like the expansion of a cloud or the dreamy convolution of a puff of white steam. Pam and the Spawer were no longer flesh and blood; they were the disembodied souls of themselves. They were their own thoughts, disencumbered of the flesh, merged delightfully into each other, and moving by volition amid a world of dreams. Everything that lay about them was symbolised into sublime moral truths, into doctrines of love and charity. All the world, all their doings, were dreams.

They dreamed they left the piano and bought more tea-biscuits at six a penny, and wandered forth (without any consciousness of legs) to redeem their promise to the donkeys. After much wandering, they dreamed they found them and fed them. Divine symbolism of love. And the girl dreamed she kissed their noses and said many good-bys. Kissed the donkeys' noses? Did she really kiss their noses? Or were these kisses, cashed upon the donkeys' noses, but the kisses of love and happiness drawn upon the bank of universal love about them, and paid into the treasury of their joint content? And she wound her soft dream arms about the donkeys' necks. But in this nebulous state of bliss, where all thoughts, all actions, all love, and all happiness seemed shared in common, and indivisible, like the particles of gases that shift and move and change their relative positions, but do not alter their substantial bulk, it might have been that her dream arms wound about the Spawer's dream neck. They dreamed their way to the cliff edge to take farewell of the sea, that lay out with a silver-grey sheen upon its blue depth. On the same seat they sat again, with their backs to the contracting shapelessness of the Royal Arms and the west, whose dusky cheek the setting sun tinged to crimson like the blush of a beautiful Creole. The penetrating eye of Farnborough looked out at them from across the water, took stock of them and closed itself once more. Anon it looked this way again, to see if they were still there, and there they were. Many strange scenes of love, in all love's aspects, has the far-seeing eye of Farnborough witnessed in its day, by the side of the water along this coast. What it does not know of these emotions—as well as of the comedies and tragedies of death—is not worth knowing.

They dreamed, these two did, that they rose again and wandered a little along the cliff line. They dreamed they saw a faint phosphorescent pallor away over the water, and the Spawer dreamed he said:

"It is the moon. Let's see it rise."

So they dreamed themselves on to another seat, and sat together and watched the moon push its red rim, like the edge of a new penny, above the misty horizon. And they watched it turn to gilt as it rose and threw aside its veil of mist, and mount up at last like a beautiful goddess with a fair white body. They dreamed themselves back to the old bench once more, at the head of the zigzag steps, cut in the face of the cliff for descent to the beach.