Part 17 (2/2)
And Felix thought: 'Not to you, only to me!' But he said:
”Not a sc.r.a.p, my love! What WERE you crying about?”
”About the world; it seems so heartless.”
And she told him about the water that had run along the nose of the old four-wheeler man.
But while he seemed to listen, Felix thought: 'I wish to G.o.d I were made of leather; then I shouldn't feel as if I'd lost the warmth inside me.
I mustn't let her see. Fathers ARE queer--I always suspected that. There goes my work for a good week!' Then he answered:
”No, my dear, the world is not heartless; it's only arranged according to certain necessary contraries: No pain, no pleasure; no dark, no light, and the rest of it. If you think, it couldn't be arranged differently.”
As he spoke a blackbird came running with a chuckle from underneath the berberis, looked at them with alarm, and ran back. Nedda raised her face.
”Dad, I mean to do something with my life!”
Felix answered:
”Yes. That's right.”
But long after Nedda had fallen into dreams that night, he lay awake, with his left foot enclosed between Floras', trying to regain that sense of warmth which he knew he must never confess to having lost.
CHAPTER XV
Flora took the news rather with the air of a mother-dog that says to her puppy: ”Oh, very well, young thing! Go and stick your teeth in it and find out for yourself!” Sooner or later this always happened, and generally sooner nowadays. Besides, she could not help feeling that she would get more of Felix, to her a matter of greater importance than she gave sign of. But inwardly the news had given her a shock almost as sharp as that felt by him. Was she really the mother of one old enough to love? Was the child that used to cuddle up to her in the window-seat to be read to, gone from her; that used to rush in every morning at all inconvenient moments of her toilet; that used to be found sitting in the dark on the stairs, like a little sleepy owl, because, for-sooth, it was so 'cosey'?
Not having seen Derek, she did not as yet share her husband's anxiety on that score, though his description was dubious:
”Upstanding young c.o.c.kerel, swinging his sporran and marching to pipes--a fine spurn about him! Born to trouble, if I know anything, trying to sweep the sky with his little broom!”
”Is he a prig?”
”No-o. There's simplicity about his scorn, and he seems to have been brought up on facts, not on literature, like most of these young monkeys. The cousins.h.i.+p I don't think matters; Kirsteen brings in too strong an out-strain. He's HER son, not Tod's. But perhaps,” he added, sighing, ”it won't last.”
Flora shook her head. ”It will last!” she said; ”Nedda's deep.”
And if Nedda held, so would Fate; no one would throw Nedda over! They naturally both felt that. 'Dionysus at the Well,' no less than 'The Last of the Laborers,' had a light week of it.
Though in a sense relieved at having parted with her secret, Nedda yet felt that she had committed desecration. Suppose Derek should mind her people knowing!
On the day that he and Sheila were to come, feeling she could not trust herself to seem even reasonably calm, she started out, meaning to go to the South Kensington Museum and wander the time away there; but once out-of-doors the sky seemed what she wanted, and, turning down the hill on the north side, she sat down under a gorse bush. Here tramps, coming in to London, pa.s.sed the night under the stars; here was a vision, however dim, of nature. And nature alone could a little soothe her ecstatic nerves.
How would he greet her? Would he be exactly as he was when they stood at the edge of Tod's orchard, above the dreamy, darkening fields, joining hands and lips, moved as they had never been moved before?
May blossom was beginning to come out along the hedge of the private grounds that bordered that bit of c.o.c.kney Common, and from it, warmed by the sun, the scent stole up to her. Familiar, like so many children of the cultured cla.s.ses, with the pagan and fairy-tales of nature, she forgot them all the moment she was really by herself with earth and sky. In their breadth, their soft and stirring continuity, they rejected bookish fancy, and woke in her rapture and yearning, a sort of long delight, a never-appeased hunger. Crouching, hands round knees, she turned her face to get the warmth of the sun, and see the white clouds go slowly by, and catch all the songs that the birds sang. And every now and then she drew a deep breath. It was true what Dad had said: There was no real heartlessness in nature. It was warm, beating, breathing.
And if things ate each other, what did it matter? They had lived and died quickly, helping to make others live. The sacred swing and circle of it went on forever, full and harmonious under the lighted sky, under the friendly stars. It was wonderful to be alive! And all done by love.
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