The Lions Share | Page 8

him, turned round once and laid himself flat and long on the ground, sighing.
The garden, after developing into an orchard and deteriorating into a scraggy plantation, ended in a low wall that was at about the level of the sea-wall and separated from it by a water-course and a strip of very green meadow. Audrey glanced instinctively back at the house to see if anybody was watching her.
Flank Hall, which for a hundred years had been called "the new hall," was a seemly Georgian residence, warm in colour, with some quaint woodwork; and like most such buildings in Essex, it made a very happy marriage with the landscape. Its dormers and fine chimneys glowed amid the dark bare trees, and they alone would have captivated a Londoner possessing those precious attributes, fortunately ever spreading among the enlightened middle-classes, a motor-car, a cultured taste in architecture, and a desire to enter the squirearchy. Audrey loathed the house. For her it was the last depth of sordidness and the commonplace. She could imagine positively nothing less romantic. She thought of the ground floor on chill March mornings with no fires anywhere save a red gleam in the dining-room, and herself wandering about in it idle, at a loss for a diversion, an ambition, an effort, a real task; and she thought of the upper floor, a mainly unoccupied wilderness of iron bedsteads and yellow chests of drawers and chipped earthenware and islands of carpets, and her mother plaintively and weariedly arguing with some servant over a slop-pail in a corner. The images of the interior, indelibly printed in her soul, desolated her.
Mozewater she loved, and every souvenir of it was exquisite--red barges beating miraculously up the shallow puddles to Moze Quay, equinoctial spring-tides when the estuary was a tremendous ocean covered with foam and the sea-wall felt the light lash of spray, thunderstorms in autumn gathering over the yellow melancholy of deathlike sunsets, wild birds crying across miles of uncovered mud at early morning and duck-hunters crouching in punts behind a waving screen of delicate grasses to wing them, and the mysterious shapes of steamers and warships in the offing beyond the Sand.... The sail of the receding yacht gleamed now against the Sand, and its flashing broke her heart; for it was the flashing of freedom. She thought of the yachtsman; he was very courteous and deferential; a mild creature; he had behaved to her as to a woman.... Oh! To be the petted and capricious wife of such a man, to nod commands, to enslave with a smile, to want a thing and instantly to have it, to be consulted and to decide, to spend with large gestures, to be charitable, to be adored by those whom you had saved from disaster, to increase happiness wherever you went ... and to be free!....
The little dog jumped up at her because he was tired of being ignored, and she caught him and kissed him again and again passionately, and he wriggled with ecstasy and licked her ears with all the love in him. And in kissing him she kissed grave and affectionate husbands, she kissed the lovely scenery of the Sound, and she kissed the magnificent ideal of emancipation. But the dog had soon had enough of her arms; he broke free, sprang, alighted, and rolled over, and arose sniffing, with earth on his black muzzle....
He looked up at her inquiringly.... Strange, short-frocked blue figure looking down at him! She had a bulging forehead; her brown eyes were tunnelled underneath it. But what living eyes, what ardent eyes, that blazed up and sank like a fire! What delicate and exact mirrors of the secret traffic between her soul and the soul of the world! She had full cheeks, and a large mouth ripe red, inviting and provocative. In the midst, an absurd small unprominent nose that meant nothing! Her complexion was divine, surpassing all similes. To caress that smooth downy cheek (if you looked close you could see the infinitesimal down against the light like an aura on the edge of the silhouette), even to let the gaze dwell on it, what an enchantment!... She considered herself piquant and comely, and she was not deceived. She had long hands.
The wind from afar on her cheek reminded her poignantly that she was a prisoner. She could not go to the clustered village on the left, nor into the saltings on the right, nor even on to the sea-wall where the new rushes and grasses were showing. All the estuary was barred, and the winding road that mounted the slope towards Colchester. Her revolt against injustice was savage. Hatred of her father surged up in her like glittering lava. She had long since ceased to try to comprehend him. She despised herself because