They had gone to the “pictures,” but soon the moving screen had become a dazzle to Ivy, the red darkness an enchantment, the tinkling music an intoxication. Seagrim’s huge brown hand lay heavily on hers, and her limbs shook as she leaned against his shoulder, almost in silence, since they found it hard to understand each other’s speech. The man thrilled and confused her as no other had done—whether it was his riper age, or his almost perfect physical beauty, or some strange animal force that thrilled his silence and slow clumsy movements, she did not seek to tell. Self-knowledge was beyond her—all she knew was that she could never give him the careless chum-like affection she had given her boys, that between them there never would be those light hearty kisses which she had so often taken and bestowed. She felt herself languid, troubled, full of a dim glamour that brought both delight and pain. The music, the red glow all seemed part of her sensation, though before she used scarcely to notice them, except to hail a popular tune or an opportunity for caresses.
When the show ended, the soldiers offered to walk with the girls as far as Four Wents, where the Puddledock lane joins the South Road. Jen and the miner walked on ahead, she holding stiffly by his arm, in a manner suitable to one demi-affianced elsewhere. Ivy and Seagrim followed. They did not speak; his arm was about her, and every now and then he would stop and pull her to him, dragging her up against him in silent passion, taking from her lips kiss after kiss. The aching passionate night looked down on them from the sky where the great stars jigged like flames, was close to them in the hedges where the scented night-wind fluttered, and the dim froth of chervil and bennet swam against the hazels. For the first time Ivy seemed to feel a hushed yet powerful life in the country which till then she had scarcely heeded more than the music and red lamps of the show. Now the scents that puffed out of the grass made her senses swim, the soft sough of the wind over the fields, the distant cry of an owl in Tillighe Wood, made her heart ache with a longing that was half its own consummation, made her lean in a drowse of ecstasy and languor against Seagrim’s beating heart, as he held her in the crook of his arm, close to his side.
At the Wents the parting came, with a loud ring of laughter from Jen, and a “pleased to ha’ met yo’” from the miner. But Ivy clung to her man, her eyes blurred with tears, her throat husky and parched with love as she murmured against his thick brown neck—
“I’ll be seeing you agaun?...”
“Aye, and yo’ will, li’l lass, li’l loove” ... he swore, and straightway made tryst.
When he was gone the night still seemed full of him—his strength and his beauty and his wonder.
2
Ivy was in love. The glamour had transmuted her country stuff as surely as it transmutes more delicate substance. The spring rain falls on the thick-stalked hogweed as on the spurred columbine, and the divine poetry of Love had given to her, as to a more tender nature, its unfailing gift of a new heaven and a new earth.
Her whole being seemed gathered up into Seagrim, into a strange happiness which had its roots in pain. For the first time pain and happiness were united in one emotion; when she was away from him, pain was the strong partner, when with him, then happiness prevailed—and yet not always, for sometimes in his presence her heart swooned within her, and her face would grow pale under his kisses and a moan stifle in her throat, and also, sometimes, when he was away, a strange ecstasy would seize her, and all her world would shine, and her common things of slops and guts and mire become beautiful, and the very thought of his being dazzle all the earth....