The Romantic | Page 8

were worth our keep from the third day."
"Do you want to stay on here?"
"Rather."
"Very well then, so do I. That settles it."
"Get up," she said, "and come along. Gwinnie's frantic."

He sat up, bowed forwards, his hands hanging loose over his knees.
She stood and looked down at him, at the arch of his long, slender back
dropping to the narrow hips. She could feel the sudden crush of her
breath in her chest and the sighing throb in her throat and her lips
parting.
He grasped the hands she stretched out to him at arms' length. She set
her teeth and pressed her feet to the ground, and leaned back, her
weight against his weight, tugging.
He came up to his feet, alert, laughing at the heavy strength of her pull.
As they ran down the field he still held, loosely, like a thing forgotten,
her right hand.
* * * * *
Through the long June night on her bed in the room under the
gable--the hot room that smelt of plaster and of the apples stored in the
loft behind it--she lay thinking.
Gwinnie had turned her back, burrowing into her pillow with a final
shrug of her hips. She was asleep now in her corner.
"If I were you I wouldn't think about him, Sharlie"--She knew what
Gwinnie meant. But thinking was one thing and caring was another.
Thinking was the antidote to caring. If she had let her mind play freely
over Gibson Herbert in the beginning--But Gibson stopped her thinking,
and John Conway made her think. That was the difference.
There was nothing about John that was like Gibson. Not a look, not a
gesture, not the least thought in his mind. His mind was like his body,
clean and cold and beautiful. Set on fire only by dreams; loving you in
a dream, a dream that burned him up and left him cold to you. Cold and
clean.
There were things she laid up against him, the poor dear; a secret hoard
of grievances now clear to her in the darkness; she found herself
turning them over and over, as if positively her mind owed his romantic
apathy a grudge. Little things she remembered. Three things.
Yesterday in the hayfield, John pitching hay on to the cart, and she
standing on the top of the load, flattening down the piles as he swung
them up. Gwinnie came with a big fork, swanking, for fun, trying to
pitch a whole haycock. In the dark of the room she could see Gwinnie's
little body straining back from the waist, her legs stiffening, her face
pink and swollen; and John's face looking at Gwinnie.

She shouted down at him, "Why can't you take the damned thing?
She'll break her back with it." And he shouted up, "That's her look-out."
(But he took it.) He didn't like Gwinnie.
That time. And the time Cowslip calved, the darling choosing the one
night old Burton was away and Jim down with flu. She had to hold the
lantern. Straw littered in the half-lighted shed. Cowslip swinging her
bald-faced head round to you, her humble, sorrowful eyes imploring,
between her groans and the convulsive heavings of her flanks. A noise
between a groan and a bellow, a supreme convulsion. The dark wall,
the white funnel of light from the lantern, and John's face in the flash....
But he had been sorry for Cowslip. Going out with the lantern
afterwards she had found him in the yard, by the wall, bent double,
shivering and retching. And she had sung out to him "Buck up, John.
She's licked it clean. It's the dearest little calf you ever saw."
Pity. Pity could drag your face tight and hard, like Burton's when his
mare, Jenny, died of colic.
But before that--the night they went to Stow Fair together; crossing the
street at the sharp turn by the church gate, something happened. They
hadn't heard the motor car coming; it was down on them before they
could see it, swerving round her side of the street. He had had his hand
tight on her arm to steer her through the crowd. When the car came ...
when the car came ... he let go and jumped clean to the curb. She could
feel the splash-board graze her thigh, as she sprang clear of it, quick,
like a dog.
She was sure he jumped first. She was sure he hadn't let her go before
the car came. She could see the blaze of the lamps and feel his grip
slacken on her arm.
She wasn't sure. He couldn't have jumped. He couldn't have let go. Of
course he hadn't. She had imagined it. She imagined all sorts of things.
If she could make them