The Romantic | Page 3

rub it off on me. I want to keep clean."
"Isn't it a bit too late?"
"Not if you clear out at once. This minute." He called her "a cruel little
devil."
She could forgive him for that. She could forgive him ending it in any
beastly way he liked, provided he did end it. But not last night. To
come crawling back, three months after, wanting to begin again.
Thinking it was possible.
There had been nothing worse than that. Except that one dreadful
minute last year when he had wanted to raise her
salary--afterwards--and she had said "What _for_?" And their faces had
turned from each other, flaming with the fire of her refusal.
What had he really thought of her? Did he think she wanted to get
anything out of their passion? What could you want to get out of it, or
give, but joy? Pure joy. Beauty.
At the bend of the road the trees parted. A slender blue channel of sky
flowed overhead between the green tops.
If not joy, then truth; reality. The clear reality of yourself, Charlotte
Redhead. Of Gibson Herbert. Even now it would be all right so long as
you knew what it was and didn't lie about it.
That evening in the office when he came to her--she could remember
the feeling that shot up suddenly and ran over her and shook her brain,
making her want him to take her in his arms. It was that. It had never
been anything but that. She had wanted him to take her, and he knew it.
Only, if he hadn't come to her and looked at her she wouldn't have
thought of it; she would have gone on working for him without
thinking. That was what he didn't know, what he wouldn't have
believed if you had told him.
She had come to the top of the hill. At the crossroads she saw the grey
front of her inn, the bow window jutting, small black shining panes
picked out with the clean white paint of the frame-work.
Upstairs their breakfast table stood in the window bow as they had left
it. Bread he had broken on the greasy plate. His cup with the coffee he
couldn't drink. Pathetic, if you hadn't remembered.

"You might as well. If it isn't you, it'll be another woman, Sharlie. If it
isn't me, it'll be another man."
That was what he had thought her.
It didn't matter.

II
She stood at the five roads, swinging her stick, undecided.
The long line of the beeches drew her, their heads bowed to the north as
the south wind had driven them. The blue-white road drew her, rising,
dipping and rising; between broad green borders under grey walls.
She walked. She could feel joy breaking loose in her again, beating up
and up, provoked and appeased by the strong, quick movement of her
body. The joy she had gone to her lover for, the pure joy he couldn't
give her, coming back out of the time before she knew him.
Nothing mattered when your body was light and hard and you could
feel the ripple and thrill of the muscles in your stride.
She wouldn't have to think of him again. She wouldn't have to think of
any other man. She didn't want any more of that again, ever. She could
go on and on like this, by herself, without even Gwinnie; not caring a
damn.
If she had been cruel--if she had wanted to hurt Effie. She hadn't meant
to hurt her.
She thought of things. Places she had been happy in. She loved the high
open country. Fancy sitting with Gibson in his stuffy office, day after
day, for five years. Fancy going to Glasgow with him. Glasgow--
No. No.
She thought: "I can pretend it didn't happen. Nothing's happened. I'm
myself. The same me I was before."
Suddenly she stood still. On the top of the ridge the whole sky opened,
throbbing with light, immense as the sky above a plain.
Hills--thousands of hills. Thousands of smooth curves joining and
parting, overlapping, rolling together.
What did you want? What did you want? How could you want anything
but this for ever?
Across the green field she saw the farm. Tall, long-skirted elms
standing up in a row before the sallow ricks and long grey barns. Under
the loaded droop of green a grey sharp-pointed gable, topped by a stone

ball. Four Scotch firs beside it, slender and strange.
She stood leaning over the white gate, looking and thinking.
Funny things, colts grazing. Short bodies that stopped at their shoulders;
long, long necks hanging down like tails, pushing their heads along the
ground. She could hear their nostrils breathing and the scrinch, scrinch
of their teeth tearing