劳伦斯中短篇小说精选(txt+pdf+epub+mobi电子书下载)

作者：(英)劳伦斯

出版社：清华大学出版社

格式: AZW3, DOCX, EPUB, MOBI, PDF, TXT

劳伦斯中短篇小说精选试读：

前言

戴维·赫伯特·劳伦斯（David Herbert Lawrence，1885—1930），英国著名小说家、诗人、散文家，被誉为“英国文学史上最伟大的人物之一”。

劳伦斯于1885年9月11日出生在英国诺丁汉郡的一个矿工家庭。他的父亲是一位矿工，接受的教育很少；母亲出身于中产阶级家庭，受过良好的教育。父亲喜欢纵欲享乐；母亲却古板拘谨，这种不和谐的家庭结构对劳伦斯日后的创作产生了深远的影响。劳伦斯自小身体孱弱、敏感，他是在母爱的庇护下长大成人的，他的成名作《儿子和情人》正是带有他独特家庭经历的自传体小说。在1912年专门从事文学创作之前，劳伦斯当过会计、工人、雇员和小学教师等。1911年，劳伦斯出版了了第一部长篇小说《白孔雀》。1913年发表第一部重要小说《儿子与情人》，1915年出版了小说《虹》，1921年出版《恋爱中的女人》，1928年出版《查泰莱夫人的情人》。这些小说的核心内容，都是围绕着性展开的，劳伦斯把人对性的追求，看成是引起一切生活现象的根源。其中，长篇小说《查泰莱夫人的情人》，由于毫不隐晦、直白地性爱描写，曾被斥为淫秽作品，受到英国当局的抨击和查禁。除以上这些作品外，劳伦斯还出版了《亚伦之杖》（1922）、《袋鼠》（1923）等其他题材的小说；出版的诗集有《爱诗及其他》（1913）、《爱神》（1916）、《如意花》（1929）等。劳伦斯长期旅居国外，到过德国、法国、意大利等欧洲国家以及澳洲和美洲。1930年3月2日，劳伦斯病逝于法国的旺斯。

近二十年的创作生涯中，这位不朽的文学大师共创作了十多部小说，三本游记，三本短篇小说集，多部诗歌、散文集、书信集和评论等。在种类繁多的作品中，小说最能代表他的文学成就。其中，《恋爱中的女人》、《查泰莱夫人的情人》、《虹》、《儿子与情人》等小说已成为20世纪世界文学的经典名作，这些小说被译成世界上几十种文字，并多次被搬上银幕，在世界上广为流传。

除长篇小说之外，劳伦斯的中短篇小说在世界上也有重要影响，他是20世纪最重要的中短篇小说作家之一。他的中短篇小说比长篇小说更为明快简洁、生动细腻、自然真切，充满诗歌般的语言、贴切入微的心理描写和震撼心旌的激情，充分表现了他高超的写作技巧和风格。本书选编了他的18篇中短篇代表作，从各个不同的角度展现了他在中短篇小说领域的成就。本书采用中文导读英文版的形式出版。在中文导读中，我们尽力使其贴近原作的精髓，也尽可能保留原作的风格。我们希望能够编出为当代中国读者所喜爱的经典读本。读者在阅读英文故事之前，可以先阅读中文导读内容，这样有利于了解故事背景，从而加快阅读速度。我们相信，这些经典著作的引进对加强当代中国读者，特别是青少年读者的科学素养和人文修养是非常有帮助的。

本书主要内容由王勋、纪飞等编译。参加本书故事素材搜集整理及编译工作的还有郑佳、刘乃亚、赵雪、左新杲、黄福成、冯洁、徐鑫、马启龙、王业伟、王旭敏、陈楠、王多多、邵舒丽、周丽萍、王晓旭、李永振、孟宪行、熊红华、胡国平、熊建国、徐平国、王小红等。限于我们的文学素养和英语水平，书中难免会有不当之处，衷心希望读者朋友批评指正。春天的阴影

The Shades of Spring

一

赛森回来了，他要回威力沃特农庄去。他依然像以前一样要从林场穿过去抄近路。以前走这条路从来没有受过阻拦，但这一次却被一位他意想不到的人拦住了。

这是一个春光明媚的早晨，赛森心情舒畅，几乎是蹦蹦跳跳地走在那条熟悉的林间小道上。忽然，一个守林人站在他面前挡住了去路。这个人名叫阿瑟·皮尔比姆，是原来守林人内勒的侄儿，内勒因患风湿，阿瑟就接替了他的工作。他现在正在向赛森过去追求过的一位姑娘希尔达·米勒希普求爱。阿瑟自然是知道赛森的，一番盘问之后，阿瑟得知眼前这位便是赛森，于是便诘问他为何已经结了婚，却还不断给自己的心上人希尔达·米勒希普写信。一时间各种复杂的情绪涌上心头，赛森恼羞成怒，便快步走开了。

Ⅰ

t was a mile nearer through the wood. Mechanically, Syson turned up by the forge and lifted the field-gate. The blacksmith and his mate stood still, watching the trespasser. But Syson looked too much a gentleman to be accosted. They let him go in silence across the small field to the wood.

There was not the least difference between this morning and those of the bright springs, six or eight years back. White and sandy-gold fowls still scratched round the gate, littering the earth and the field with feathers and scratched-up rubbish. Between the two thick holly bushes in the wood-hedge was the hidden gap, whose fence one climbed to get into the wood; the bars were scored just the same by the keeper’s boots. He was back in the eternal.

Syson was extraordinarily glad. Like an uneasy spirit he had returned to the country of his past, and he found it waiting for him, unaltered. The hazel still spread glad little hands downwards, the bluebells here were still wan and few, among the lush grass and in shade of the bushes.

The path through the wood, on the very brow of a slope, ran winding easily for a time. All around were twiggy oaks, just issuing their gold, and floor spaces diapered with woodruff, with patches of dog-mercury and tufts of hyacinth. Two fallen trees still lay across the track. Syson jolted down a steep, rough slope, and came again upon the open land, this time looking north as through a great window in the wood. He stayed to gaze over the level fields of the hill-top, at the village which strewed the bare upland as if it had tumbled off the passing waggons of industry, and been forsaken. There was a stiff, modern, grey little church, and blocks and rows of red dwellings lying at random; at the back, the twinkling headstocks of the pit, and the looming pit-hill. All was naked and out-of-doors, not a tree! It was quite unaltered.

Syson turned, satisfied, to follow the path that sheered downhill into the wood. He was curiously elated, feeling himself back in an enduring vision. He started. A keeper was standing a few yards in front, barring the way.

“Where might you be going this road, sir?” asked the man. The tone of his question had a challenging twang. Syson looked at the fellow with an impersonal, observant gaze. It was a young man of four or five and twenty, ruddy and well favoured. His dark blue eyes now stared aggressively at the intruder. His black moustache, very thick, was cropped short over a small, rather soft mouth. In every other respect the fellow was manly and good-looking. He stood just above middle height; the strong forward thrust of his chest, and the perfect ease of his erect, self-sufficient body, gave one the feeling that he was taut with animal life, like the thick jet of a fountain balanced in itself. He stood with the butt of his gun on the ground, looking uncertainly and questioningly at Syson. The dark, restless eyes of the trespasser, examining the man and penetrating into him without heeding his office, troubled the keeper and made him flush.

“Where is Naylor? Have you got his job?” Syson asked.

“You’re not from the House, are you?” inquired the keeper. It could not be, since everyone was away.

“No, I’m not from the House,” the other replied. It seemed to amuse him.

“Then might I ask where you were making for?” said the keeper, nettled.

“Where I am making for?” Syson repeated. “I am going to Willey–Water Farm.”

“This isn’t the road.”

“I think so. Down this path, past the well, and out by the white gate.”

“But that’s not the public road.”

“I suppose not. I used to come so often, in Naylor’s time, I had forgotten. Where is he, by the way?”

“Crippled with rheumatism,” the keeper answered reluctantly.

“Is he?” Syson exclaimed in pain.

“And who might you be?” asked the keeper, with a new intonation.

“John Adderley Syson; I used to live in Cordy Lane.”

“Used to court Hilda Millership?”

Syson’s eyes opened with a pained smile. He nodded. There was an awkward silence.

“And you—who are you?” asked Syson.

“Arthur Pilbeam—Naylor’s my uncle,” said the other.

“You live here in Nuttall?”

“I’m lodgin’ at my uncle’s—at Naylor’s.”

“I see!”

“Did you say you was goin’ down to Willey–Water?” asked the keeper.

“Yes.”

There was a pause of some moments, before the keeper blurted: “I’m courtin’ Hilda Millership.”

The young fellow looked at the intruder with a stubborn defiance, almost pathetic. Syson opened new eyes.

“Are you?” he said, astonished. The keeper flushed dark.

“She and me are keeping company,” he said.

“I didn’t know!” said Syson. The other man waited uncomfortably.

“What, is the thing settled?” asked the intruder.

“How, settled?” retorted the other sulkily.

“Are you going to get married soon, and all that?”

The keeper stared in silence for some moments, impotent.

“I suppose so,” he said, full of resentment.

“Ah!” Syson watched closely.

“I’m married myself,” he added, after a time.

“You are?” said the other incredulously.

Syson laughed in his brilliant, unhappy way.

“This last fifteen months,” he said.

The keeper gazed at him with wide, wondering eyes, apparently thinking back, and trying to make things out.

“Why, didn’t you know?” asked Syson.

“No, I didn’t,” said the other sulkily.

There was silence for a moment.

“Ah well!” said Syson, “I will go on. I suppose I may.” The keeper stood in silent opposition. The two men hesitated in the open, grassy space, set around with small sheaves of sturdy bluebells; a little open platform on the brow of the hill. Syson took a few indecisive steps forward, then stopped.

“I say, how beautiful!” he cried.

He had come in full view of the downslope. The wide path ran from his feet like a river, and it was full of bluebells, save for a green winding thread down the centre, where the keeper walked. Like a stream the path opened into azure shallows at the levels, and there were pools of bluebells, with still the green thread winding through, like a thin current of ice-water through blue lakes. And from under the twig-purple of the bushes swam the shadowed blue, as if the flowers lay in flood water over the woodland.

“Ah, isn’t it lovely!” Syson exclaimed; this was his past, the country he had abandoned, and it hurt him to see it so beautiful. Woodpigeons cooed overhead, and the air was full of the brightness of birds singing.

“If you’re married, what do you keep writing to her for, and sending her poetry books and things?” asked the keeper. Syson stared at him, taken aback and humiliated. Then he began to smile.

“Well,” he said, “I did not know about you . . .”

Again the keeper flushed darkly.

“But if you are married—” he charged.

“I am,” answered the other cynically.

Then, looking down the blue, beautiful path, Syson felt his own humiliation. “What right have I to hang on to her?” he thought, bitterly self-contemptuous.

“She knows I’m married and all that,” he said.

“But you keep sending her books,” challenged the keeper.

Syson, silenced, looked at the other man quizzically, half pitying. Then he turned.

“Good day,” he said, and was gone. Now, everything irritated him: the two sallows, one all gold and perfume and murmur, one silver-green and bristly, reminded him, that here he had taught her about pollination. What a fool he was! What god-forsaken folly it all was!

“Ah well,” he said to himself; “the poor devil seems to have a grudge against me. I’ll do my best for him.” He grinned to himself, in a very bad temper.

二

不久，赛森走到了希尔达·米勒希普姑娘的农庄。希尔达·米勒希普突然见到赛森，有些回不过神，呆立在那里。他来得很不凑巧，农庄上的男女老少还没吃完午饭，但是主人还是把他请进了家门。

再次见到希尔达·米勒希普，赛森觉得她变得更加妩媚动人了。但她的态度却直率而冷淡，这种态度令他感到陌生和局促。他参观了她的起居室，那里已经大变样，早已不是昔日熟悉的布置。眼前的希尔达·米勒希普已经是一个全新的人了。跳出了以前的情思，赛森觉得自己现在反而可以更客观地评价她。

过了一会儿，两人出去散步，在田野间见到各种鸟雀，她依然使用那些他俩过去共同创造出来的词语，但他却早已不用。停了一会儿，她告诉他自己已经有了情人，赛森便说他们可能已经见过面了。二人打着哑谜，持续着往日常有的争辩。

Ⅱ

he farm was less than a hundred yards from the wood’s edge. The wall of trees formed the fourth side to the open quadrangle. The house faced the wood. With tangled emotions, Syson noted the plum blossom falling on the profuse, coloured primroses, which he himself had brought here and set. How they had increased! There were thick tufts of scarlet, and pink, and pale purple primroses under the plum trees. He saw somebody glance at him through the kitchen window, heard men’s voices.

The door opened suddenly: very womanly she had grown! He felt himself going pale.

“You?—Addy!” she exclaimed, and stood motionless.

“Who?” called the farmer’s voice. Men’s low voices answered. Those low voices, curious and almost jeering, roused the tormented spirit in the visitor. Smiling brilliantly at her, he waited.

“Myself—why not?” he said.

The flush burned very deep on her cheek and throat.

“We are just finishing dinner,” she said.

“Then I will stay outside.” He made a motion to show that he would sit on the red earthenware pipkin that stood near the door among the daffodils, and contained the drinking water.

“Oh no, come in,” she said hurriedly. He followed her. In the doorway, he glanced swiftly over the family, and bowed. Everyone was confused. The farmer, his wife, and the four sons sat at the coarsely laid dinner-table, the men with arms bare to the elbows.

“I am sorry I come at lunch-time,” said Syson.

“Hello, Addy!” said the farmer, assuming the old form of address, but his tone cold. “How are you?”

And he shook hands.

“Shall you have a bit?” he invited the young visitor, but taking for granted the offer would be refused. He assumed that Syson was become too refined to eat so roughly. The young man winced at the imputation.

“Have you had any dinner?” asked the daughter.

“No,” replied Syson. “It is too early. I shall be back at half-past one.”

“You call it lunch, don’t you?” asked the eldest son, almost ironical. He had once been an intimate friend of this young man.

“We’ll give Addy something when we’ve finished,” said the mother, an invalid, deprecating.

“No—don’t trouble. I don’t want to give you any trouble,” said Syson.

“You could allus live on fresh air an’ scenery,” laughed the youngest son, a lad of nineteen.

Syson went round the buildings, and into the orchard at the back of the house, where daffodils all along the hedgerow swung like yellow, ruffled birds on their perches. He loved the place extraordinarily, the hills ranging round, with bear-skin woods covering their giant shoulders, and small red farms like brooches clasping their garments; the blue streak of water in the valley, the bareness of the home pasture, the sound of myriad-threaded bird-singing, which went mostly unheard. To his last day, he would dream of this place, when he felt the sun on his face, or saw the small handfuls of snow between the winter twigs, or smelt the coming of spring.

Hilda was very womanly. In her presence he felt constrained. She was twenty-nine, as he was, but she seemed to him much older. He felt foolish, almost unreal, beside her. She was so static. As he was fingering some shed plum blossom on a low bough, she came to the back door to shake the table-cloth. Fowls raced from the stackyard, birds rustled from the trees. Her dark hair was gathered up in a coil like a crown on her head. She was very straight, distant in her bearing. As she folded the cloth, she looked away over the hills.

Presently Syson returned indoors. She had prepared eggs and curd cheese, stewed gooseberries and cream.

“Since you will dine to-night,” she said, “I have only given you a light lunch.”

“It is awfully nice,” he said. “You keep a real idyllic atmosphere— your belt of straw and ivy buds.”

Still they hurt each other.

He was uneasy before her. Her brief, sure speech, her distant bearing, were unfamiliar to him. He admired again her grey-black eyebrows, and her lashes. Their eyes met. He saw, in the beautiful grey and black of her glance, tears and a strange light, and at the back of all, calm acceptance of herself, and triumph over him.

He felt himself shrinking. With an effort he kept up the ironic manner.

She sent him into the parlour while she washed the dishes. The long low room was refurnished from the Abbey sale, with chairs upholstered in claret-coloured rep, many years old, and an oval table of polished walnut, and another piano, handsome, though still antique. In spite of the strangeness, he was pleased. Opening a high cupboard let into the thickness of the wall, he found it full of his books, his old lesson-books, and volumes of verse he had sent her, English and German. The daffodils in the white window-bottoms shone across the room, he could almost feel their rays. The old glamour caught him again. His youthful water-colours on the wall no longer made him grin; he remembered how fervently he had tried to paint for her, twelve years before.

She entered, wiping a dish, and he saw again the bright, kernel-white beauty of her arms.

“You are quite splendid here,” he said, and their eyes met.

“Do you like it?” she asked. It was the old, low, husky tone of intimacy. He felt a quick change beginning in his blood. It was the old, delicious sublimation, the thinning, almost the vaporizing of himself, as if his spirit were to be liberated.

“Aye,” he nodded, smiling at her like a boy again. She bowed her head.

“This was the countess’s chair,” she said in low tones. “I found her scissors down here between the padding.”

“Did you? Where are they?”

Quickly, with a lilt in her movement, she fetched her work-basket, and together they examined the long-shanked old scissors.

“What a ballad of dead ladies!” he said, laughing, as he fitted his fingers into the round loops of the countess’s scissors.

“I knew you could use them,” she said, with certainty. He looked at his fingers, and at the scissors. She meant his fingers were fine enough for the small-looped scissors.

“That is something to be said for me,” he laughed, putting the scissors aside. She turned to the window. He noticed the fine, fair down on her cheek and her upper lip, and her soft, white neck, like the throat of a nettle flower, and her fore-arms, bright as newly blanched kernels. He was looking at her with new eyes, and she was a different person to him. He did not know her. But he could regard her objectively now.

“Shall we go out awhile?” she asked.

“Yes!” he answered. But the predominant emotion, that troubled the excitement and perplexity of his heart, was fear, fear of that which he saw. There was about her the same manner, the same intonation in her voice, now as then, but she was not what he had known her to be. He knew quite well what she had been for him. And gradually he was realizing that she was something quite other, and always had been.

She put no covering on her head, merely took off her apron, saying, “We will go by the larches.” As they passed the old orchard, she called him in to show him a blue-tit’s nest in one of the apple trees, and a sycock’s in the hedge. He rather wondered at her surety, at a certain hardness like arrogance hidden under her humility.

“Look at the apple buds,” she said, and he then perceived myriads of little scarlet balls among the drooping boughs. Watching his face, her eyes went hard. She saw the scales were fallen from him, and at last he was going to see her as she was. It was the thing she had most dreaded in the past, and most needed, for her soul’s sake. Now he was going to see her as she was. He would not love her, and he would know he never could have loved her. The old illusion gone, they were strangers, crude and entire. But he would give her her due—she would have her due from him.

She was brilliant as he had not known her. She showed him nests: a jenny wren’s in a low bush.

“See this jinty’s!” she exclaimed.

He was surprised to hear her use the local name. She reached carefully through the thorns, and put her fingers in the nest’s round door.

“Five!” she said. “Tiny little things.”

She showed him nests of robins, and chaffinches, and linnets, and buntings; of a wagtail beside the water.

“And if we go down, nearer the lake, I will show you a kingfisher’s . . .”

“Among the young fir trees,” she said, “there’s a throstle’s or a blackie’s on nearly every bough, every ledge. The first day, when I had seen them all, I felt as if I mustn’t go in the wood. It seemed a city of birds: and in the morning, hearing them all, I thought of the noisy early markets. I was afraid to go in my own wood.”

She was using the language they had both of them invented. Now it was all her own. He had done with it. She did not mind his silence, but was always dominant, letting him see her wood. As they came along a marshy path where forget-me-nots were opening in a rich blue drift: “We know all the birds, but there are many flowers we can’t find out,” she said. It was half an appeal to him, who had known the names of things.

She looked dreamily across to the open fields that slept in the sun.

“I have a lover as well, you know,” she said, with assurance, yet dropping again almost into the intimate tone.

This woke in him the spirit to fight her.

“I think I met him. He is good-looking—also in Arcady.”

Without answering, she turned into a dark path that led up-hill, where the trees and undergrowth were very thick.

“They did well,” she said at length, “to have various altars to various gods, in old days.”

“Ah yes!” he agreed. “To whom is the new one?”

“There are no old ones,” she said. “I was always looking for this.”

“And whose is it?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, looking full at him.

“I’m very glad, for your sake,” he said, “that you are satisfied.”

“Aye—but the man doesn’t matter so much,” she said. There was a pause.

“No!” he exclaimed, astonished, yet recognizing her as her real self.

“It is one’s self that matters,” she said. “Whether one is being one’s own self and serving one’s own God.”

There was silence, during which he pondered. The path was almost flowerless, gloomy. At the side, his heels sank into soft clay.

三

她带着自信和挑衅的神情和语气告诉他，在他结婚的那天晚上，自己也和那位守林人阿瑟私自结合了。显然，她想要挑起什么，起初，赛森只是沉默地凝视着她，后来终于忍不住问她这样做有什么意义，又问她是否感到失望，这终于令她说出了一直想说的话。她说她只有那样才能得到自由，说自己以前被赛森弄得失去了自我，而且她坚决地说自己是爱阿瑟的。

他们信步到了守林人的小木屋。希尔达·米勒希普拿出钥匙开门进去，赛森也跟了进去。当他看到阿瑟为希尔达·米勒希普布置的小房间时，不由得赞叹起来，并恭喜她得到了这样一个浪漫的男人。赛森依然不肯认输，便问她阿瑟身上欠缺什么，但她却说他拥有一切。

之后他们便争执起来，他知道他错看了她，令她迷失自我，而且造成一种貌似是她逼他离开她的假象。他大声叫嚷着说，是她硬要让他争取奖学金，去外面闯荡，去出人头地的，这一切都是为了满足她的要求。

此时，阿瑟回来了。看见他们俩，阿瑟不理不睬地去整理自己的兽皮。赛森打算告辞，希尔达·米勒希普便喊阿瑟过来，要给他们介绍认识，那声调因为颤抖变得古怪而高亢。两个男人却说彼此已经见过面了。赛森又趁机说以后要和希尔达·米勒希普停止通信。

于是三人走出了屋子。在山下的小路尽头，她和赛森分别了。赛森的心中有一种强烈的感受，像是裂开了一个伤口。他忽然发现，原来他和希尔达·米勒希普之间的关系从来就不真实。远处传来希尔达·米勒希普和护林人的交谈声。阿瑟被蜜蜂蜇了一下，希尔达·米勒希普小心地为他拔出毒刺，吸出毒液。希尔达·米勒希普一面安慰阿瑟，一面向他解释，说自己没有因为赛森离去而不高兴，还说赛森已经永远离开了她的生活。

Ⅲ

“J,” she said, very slowly, “I was married the same night as you.”

He looked at her.

“Not legally, of course,” she replied. “But—actually.”

“To the keeper?” he said, not knowing what else to say.

She turned to him.

“You thought I could not?” she said. But the flush was deep in her cheek and throat, for all her assurance.

Still he would not say anything.

“You see”—she was making an effort to explain—“I had to understand also.”

“And what does it amount to, this understanding?” he asked.

“A very great deal—does it not to you?” she replied. “One is free.”

“And you are not disappointed?”

“Far from it!” Her tone was deep and sincere.

“You love him?”

“Yes, I love him.”

“Good!” he said.

This silenced her for a while.

“Here, among his things, I love him,” she said.

His conceit would not let him be silent.

“It needs this setting?” he asked.

“It does,” she cried. “You were always making me to be not myself.”

He laughed shortly.

“But is it a matter of surroundings?” he said. He had considered her all spirit.

“I am like a plant,” she replied. “I can only grow in my own soil.”

They came to a place where the undergrowth shrank away, leaving a bare, brown space, pillared with the brick-red and purplish trunks of pine trees. On the fringe, hung the sombre green of elder trees, with flat flowers in bud, and below were bright, unfurling pennons of fern. In the midst of the bare space stood a keeper’s log hut. Pheasant-coops were lying about, some occupied by a clucking hen, some empty.

Hilda walked over the brown pine-needles to the hut, took a key from among the eaves, and opened the door. It was a bare wooden place with a carpenter’s bench and form, carpenter’s tools, an axe, snares, straps, some skins pegged down, everything in order. Hilda closed the door. Syson examined the weird flat coats of wild animals, that were pegged down to be cured. She turned some knotch in the side wall, and disclosed a second, small apartment.

“How romantic!” said Syson.

“Yes. He is very curious—he has some of a wild animal’s cunning— in a nice sense—and he is inventive, and thoughtful—but not beyond a certain point.”

She pulled back a dark green curtain. The apartment was occupied almost entirely by a large couch of heather and bracken, on which was spread an ample rabbit-skin rug. On the floor were patchwork rugs of cat-skin, and a red calf-skin, while hanging from the wall were other furs. Hilda took down one, which she put on. It was a cloak of rabbit-skin and of white fur, with a hood, apparently of the skins of stoats. She laughed at Syson from out of this barbaric mantle, saying:

“What do you think of it?”

“Ah—! I congratulate you on your man,” he replied.

“And look!” she said.

In a little jar on a shelf were some sprays, frail and white, of the first honeysuckle.

“They will scent the place at night,” she said.

He looked round curiously.

“Where does he come short, then?” he asked. She gazed at him for a few moments. Then, turning aside:

“The stars aren’t the same with him,” she said. “You could make them flash and quiver, and the forget-me-nots come up at me like phosphorescence. You could make things wonderful. I have found it out—it is true. But I have them all for myself, now.”

He laughed, saying:

“After all, stars and forget-me-nots are only luxuries. You ought to make poetry.”

“Aye,” she assented. “But I have them all now.”

Again he laughed bitterly at her.

She turned swiftly. He was leaning against the small window of the tiny, obscure room, and was watching her, who stood in the doorway, still cloaked in her mantle. His cap was removed, so she saw his face and head distinctly in the dim room. His black, straight, glossy hair was brushed clean back from his brow. His black eyes were watching her, and his face, that was clear and cream, and perfectly smooth, was flickering.

“We are very different,” she said bitterly.

Again he laughed.

“I see you disapprove of me,” he said.

“I disapprove of what you have become,” she said.

“You think we might”—he glanced at the hut—“have been like this— you and I?”

She shook her head.

“You! no; never! You plucked a thing and looked at it till you had found out all you wanted to know about it, then you threw it away,” she said.

“Did I?” he asked. “And could your way never have been my way? I suppose not.”

“Why should it?” she said. “I am a separate being.”

“But surely two people sometimes go the same way,” he said.

“You took me away from myself,” she said.

He knew he had mistaken her, had taken her for something she was not. That was his fault, not hers.

“And did you always know?” he asked.

“No—you never let me know. You bullied me. I couldn’t help myself. I was glad when you left me, really.”

“I know you were,” he said. But his face went paler, almost deathly luminous.

“Yet,” he said, “it was you who sent me the way I have gone.”

“I!” she exclaimed, in pride.

“You would have me take the Grammar School scholarship—and you would have me foster poor little Botell’s fervent attachment to me, till he couldn’t live without me—and because Botell was rich and influential. You triumphed in the wine-merchant’s offer to send me to Cambridge, to befriend his only child. You wanted me to rise in the world. And all the time you were sending me away from you— every new success of mine put a separation between us, and more for you than for me. You never wanted to come with me: you wanted just to send me to see what it was like. I believe you even wanted me to marry a lady. You wanted to triumph over society in me.”

“And I am responsible,” she said, with sarcasm.

“I distinguished myself to satisfy you,” he replied.

“Ah!” she cried, “you always wanted change, change, like a child.”

“Very well! And I am a success, and I know it, and I do some good work. But—I thought you were different. What right have you to a man?”

“What do you want?” she said, looking at him with wide, fearful eyes.

He looked back at her, his eyes pointed, like weapons.

“Why, nothing,” he laughed shortly.

There was a rattling at the outer latch, and the keeper entered. The woman glanced round, but remained standing, fur-cloaked, in the inner doorway. Syson did not move.

The other man entered, saw, and turned away without speaking. The two also were silent.

Pilbeam attended to his skins.

“I must go,” said Syson.

“Yes,” she replied.

“Then I give you ‘To our vast and varying fortunes.’” He lifted his hand in pledge.

“‘To our vast and varying fortunes,’” she answered gravely, and speaking in cold tones.

“Arthur!” she said.

The keeper pretended not to hear. Syson, watching keenly, began to smile. The woman drew herself up.

“Arthur!” she said again, with a curious upward inflection, which warned the two men that her soul was trembling on a dangerous crisis.

The keeper slowly put down his tool and came to her.

“Yes,” he said.

“I wanted to introduce you,” she said, trembling.

“I’ve met him a’ready,” said the keeper.

“Have you? It is Addy, Mr Syson, whom you know about.—This is Arthur, Mr Pilbeam,” she added, turning to Syson. The latter held out his hand to the keeper, and they shook hands in silence.

“I’m glad to have met you,” said Syson. “We drop our correspondence, Hilda?”

“Why need we?” she asked.

The two men stood at a loss.

“IS there no need?” said Syson.

Still she was silent.

“It is as you will,” she said.

They went all three together down the gloomy path.

“‘Qu’il était bleu, le ciel, et grand l’espoir,’” quoted Syson, not knowing what to say.

“What do you mean?” she said. “Besides, WE can’t walk in our wild oats—we never sowed any.”

Syson looked at her. He was startled to see his young love, his nun, his Botticelli angel, so revealed. It was he who had been the fool. He and she were more separate than any two strangers could be. She only wanted to keep up a correspondence with him—and he, of course, wanted it kept up, so that he could write to her, like Dante to some Beatrice who had never existed save in the man’s own brain.

At the bottom of the path she left him. He went along with the keeper, towards the open, towards the gate that closed on the wood. The two men walked almost like friends. They did not broach the subject of their thoughts.

Instead of going straight to the high-road gate, Syson went along the wood’s edge, where the brook spread out in a little bog, and under the alder trees, among the reeds, great yellow stools and bosses of marigolds shone. Threads of brown water trickled by, touched with gold from the flowers. Suddenly there was a blue flash in the air, as a kingfisher passed.

Syson was extraordinarily moved. He climbed the bank to the gorse bushes, whose sparks of blossom had not yet gathered into a flame. Lying on the dry brown turf, he discovered sprigs of tiny purple milkwort and pink spots of lousewort. What a wonderful world it was—marvellous, for ever new. He felt as if it were underground, like the fields of monotone hell, notwithstanding. Inside his breast was a pain like a wound. He remembered the poem of William Morris, where in the Chapel of Lyonesse a knight lay wounded, with the truncheon of a spear deep in his breast, lying always as dead, yet did not die, while day after day the coloured sunlight dipped from the painted window across the chancel, and passed away. He knew now it never had been true, that which was between him and her, not for a moment. The truth had stood apart all the time.

Syson turned over. The air was full of the sound of larks, as if the sunshine above were condensing and falling in a shower. Amid this bright sound, voices sounded small and distinct.

“But if he’s married, an’ quite willing to drop it off, what has ter against it?” said the man’s voice.

“I don’t want to talk about it now. I want to be alone.”

Syson looked through the bushes. Hilda was standing in the wood, near the gate. The man was in the field, loitering by the hedge, and playing with the bees as they settled on the white bramble flowers.

There was silence for a while, in which Syson imagined her will among the brightness of the larks. Suddenly the keeper exclaimed “Ah!” and swore. He was gripping at the sleeve of his coat, near the shoulder. Then he pulled off his jacket, threw it on the ground, and absorbedly rolled up his shirt sleeve right to the shoulder.

“Ah!” he said vindictively, as he picked out the bee and flung it away. He twisted his fine, bright arm, peering awkwardly over his shoulder.

“What is it?” asked Hilda.

“A bee—crawled up my sleeve,” he answered.

“Come here to me,” she said.

The keeper went to her, like a sulky boy. She took his arm in her hands.

“Here it is—and the sting left in-poor bee!”

She picked out the sting, put her mouth to his arm, and sucked away the drop of poison. As she looked at the red mark her mouth had made, and at his arm, she said, laughing:

“That is the reddest kiss you will ever have.”

When Syson next looked up, at the sound of voices, he saw in the shadow the keeper with his mouth on the throat of his beloved, whose head was thrown back, and whose hair had fallen, so that one rough rope of dark brown hair hung across his bare arm.

“No,” the woman answered. “I am not upset because he’s gone. You won’t understand . . .”

Syson could not distinguish what the man said. Hilda replied, clear and distinct:

“You know I love you. He has gone quite out of my life—don’t trouble about him . . .” He kissed her, murmuring. She laughed hollowly.

“Yes,” she said, indulgent. “We will be married, we will be married. But not just yet.” He spoke to her again. Syson heard nothing for a time. Then she said:

“You must go home, now, dear—you will get no sleep.”

Again was heard the murmur of the keeper’s voice, troubled by fear and passion.

“But why should we be married at once?” she said. “What more would you have, by being married? It is most beautiful as it is.”

At last he pulled on his coat and departed. She stood at the gate, not watching him, but looking over the sunny country.

When at last she had gone, Syson also departed, going back to town.鹅市

Goose Fair

一

又到了赶鹅市的时候，成群结队的鹅被赶着进了城。下午最后来的是一位村姑，她赶了十二只鹅。她的模样还算周正，但由于疲倦，那副尊容让人看着不舒服。由于普法战争，集市上的买卖不景气，姑娘的鹅也卖不出去。

Ⅰ

hrough the gloom of evening, and the flare of torches of the night before the fair, through the still fogs of the succeeding dawn came paddling the weary geese, lifting their poor feet that had been dipped in tar for shoes, and trailing them along the cobble-stones into the town. Last of all, in the afternoon, a country girl drove in her dozen birds, disconsolate because she was so late. She was a heavily built girl, fair, with regular features, and yet unprepossessing. She needed chiselling down, her contours were brutal. Perhaps it was weariness that hung her eyelids a little lower than was pleasant. When she spoke to her clumsily lagging birds it was in a snarling nasal tone. One of the silly things sat down in the gutter and refused to move. It looked very ridiculous, but also rather pitiful, squat there with its head up, refusing to be urged on by the ungentle toe of the girl. The latter swore heavily, then picked up the great complaining bird, and fronting her road stubbornly, drove on the lamentable eleven.

No one had noticed her. This afternoon the women were not sitting chatting on their doorsteps, seaming up the cotton hose, or swiftly passing through their fingers the piled white lace; and in the high dark houses the song of the hosiery frames was hushed: “Shackety-boom, Shackety-shackety-boom, Z—zzz!” As she dragged up Hollow Stone, people returned from the fair chaffed her and asked her what o’clock it was. She did not reply, her look was sullen. The Lace Market was quiet as the Sabbath: even the great brass plates on the doors were dull with neglect. There seemed an afternoon atmosphere of raw discontent. The girl stopped a moment before the dismal prospect of one of the great warehouses that had been gutted with fire. She looked at the lean, threatening walls, and watched her white flock waddling in reckless misery below, and she would have laughed out loud had the wall fallen flat upon them and relieved her of them. But the wall did not fall, so she crossed the road, and walking on the safe side, hurried after her charge. Her look was even more sullen. She remembered the state of trade—Trade, the invidious enemy; Trade, which thrust out its hand and shut the factory doors, and pulled the stockingers off their seats, and left the web half-finished on the frame; Trade, which mysteriously choked up the sources of the rivulets of wealth, and blacker and more secret than a pestilence, starved the town. Through this morose atmosphere of bad trade, in the afternoon of the first day of the fair, the girl strode down to the Poultry with eleven sound geese and one lame one to sell.

The Frenchmen were at the bottom of it! So everybody said, though nobody quite knew how. At any rate, they had gone to war with the Prussians and got beaten, and trade was ruined in Nottingham!

A little fog rose up, and the twilight gathered around. Then they flared abroad their torches in the fair, insulting the night. The girl still sat in the Poultry, and her weary geese unsold on the stones, illuminated by the hissing lamp of a man who sold rabbits and pigeons and such-like assorted live-stock.

二

在这座城的另一个角落里，另一位姑娘洛伊斯正站在门口，急切地盼望着情人威尔来家里吃饭。好不容易等来了，威尔却说他今晚要去厂里盯梢，不在这里吃饭了。于是二人拥抱了一下，威尔便驾车离开了。回到餐桌前，洛伊斯对父亲说威尔去厂里了，怕今晚有工人闹事。

Ⅱ

n another part of the town, near Sneinton Church, another girl came to the door to look at the night. She was tall and slender, dressed with the severe accuracy which marks the girl of superior culture. Her hair was arranged with simplicity about the long, pale, cleanly cut face. She leaned forward very slightly to glance down the street, listening. She very carefully preserved the appearance of having come quite casually to the door, yet she lingered and lingered and stood very still to listen when she heard a footstep, but when it proved to be only a common man, she drew herself up proudly and looked with a small smile over his head. He hesitated to glance into the open hall, lighted so spaciously with a scarlet-shaded lamp, and at the slim girl in brown silk lifted up before the light. But she, she looked over his head. He passed on.

Presently she started and hung in suspense. Somebody was crossing the road. She ran down the steps in a pretty welcome, not effuse, saying in quick, but accurately articulated words: “Will! I began to think you’d gone to the fair. I came out to listen to it. I felt almost sure you’d gone. You’re coming in, aren’t you?” She waited a moment anxiously. “We expect you to dinner, you know,” she added wistfully.

The man, who had a short face and spoke with his lip curling up on one side, in a drawling speech with ironically exaggerated intonation, replied after a short hesitation:

“I’m awfully sorry, I am, straight, Lois. It’s a shame. I’ve got to go round to the biz. Man proposes—the devil disposes.” He turned aside with irony in the darkness.

“But surely, Will!” remonstrated the girl, keenly disappointed.

“Fact, Lois!—I feel wild about it myself. But I’ve got to go down to the works. They may be getting a bit warm down there, you know”—he jerked his head in the direction of the fair. “If the Lambs get frisky!—they’re a bit off about the work, and they’d just be in their element if they could set a lighted match to something—”

“Will, you don’t think—!” exclaimed the girl, laying her hand on his arm in the true fashion of romance, and looking up at him earnestly.

“Dad’s not sure,” he replied, looking down at her with gravity. They remained in this attitude for a moment, then he said:

“I might stop a bit. It’s all right for an hour, I should think.”

She looked at him earnestly, then said in tones of deep disappointment and of fortitude: “No, Will, you must go. You’d better go—”

“It’s a shame!” he murmured, standing a moment at a loose end. Then, glancing down the street to see he was alone, he put his arm round her waist and said in a difficult voice: “How goes it?”

She let him keep her for a moment, then he kissed her as if afraid of what he was doing. They were both uncomfortable.

“Well—!” he said at length.

“Good night!” she said, setting him free to go.

He hung a moment near her, as if ashamed. Then “Good night,” he answered, and he broke away. She listened to his footsteps in the night, before composing herself to turn indoors.

“Hello!” said her father, glancing over his paper as she entered the dining-room. “What’s up, then?”

“Oh, nothing,” she replied, in her calm tones. “Will won’t be here to dinner tonight.”

“What, gone to the fair?”

“No.”

“Oh! What’s got him then?”

Lois looked at her father, and answered:

“He’s gone down to the factory. They are afraid of the hands.”

Her father looked at her closely.

“Oh, aye!” he answered, undecided, and they sat down to dinner.

三

半夜里，洛伊斯被家里的吵嚷声惊醒了。她便问母亲发生了什么事。母亲说谢比尔家的厂子失火了，父亲怕蔓延到自己家的厂子，便赶去火场了。洛伊斯一听，赶忙穿上大衣也出了门。火场火光冲天，她好不容易找到父亲，正想问问他有没有见到威尔，但父亲不由分说，托人硬把她送回家去了。洛伊斯回到家，发现母亲由于惊吓过度，很虚弱地躺在椅子上。洛伊斯安顿好母亲，便回房歇息了，但是她又怎能睡得着呢？

Ⅲ

ois returned very early. She had a fire in her bedroom. She drew the curtains and stood holding aside a heavy fold, looking out at the night. She could see only the nothingness of the fog; not even the glare of the fair was evident, though the noise clamoured small in the distance. In front of everything she could see her own faint image. She crossed to the dressing-table, and there leaned her face to the mirror, and looked at herself. She looked a long time, then she rose, changed her dress for a dressing-jacket, and took up Sesame and Lilies.

Late in the night she was roused from sleep by a bustle in the house. She sat up and heard a hurrying to and fro and the sound of anxious voices. She put on her dressing-gown and went out to her mother’s room. Seeing her mother at the head of the stairs, she said in her quick, clean voice:

“Mother, what it it?”

“Oh, child, don’t ask me! Go to bed, dear, do! I shall surely be worried out of my life.”

“Mother, what is it?” Lois was sharp and emphatic.

“I hope your father won’t go. Now I do hope your father won’t go. He’s got a cold as it is.”

“Mother, tell me what is it?” Lois took her mother’s arm.

“It’s Selby’s. I should have thought you would have heard the fire-engine, and Jack isn’t in yet. I hope we’re safe!” Lois returned to her bedroom and dressed. She coiled her plaited hair, and having put on a cloak, left the house.

She hurried along under the fog-dripping trees towards the meaner part of the town. When she got near, she saw a glare in the fog, and closed her lips tight. She hastened on till she was in the crowd. With peaked, noble face she watched the fire. Then she looked a little wildly over the fire-reddened faces in the crowd, and catching sight of her father, hurried to him.

“Oh, Dadda—is he safe? Is Will safe—?”

“Safe, aye, why not? You’ve no business here. Here, here’s Sampson, he’ll take you home. I’ve enough to bother me; there’s my own place to watch. Go home now, I can’t do with you here.”

“Have you seen Will?” she asked.

“Go home—Sampson, just take Miss Lois home—now!”

“You don’t really know where he is—father?”

“Go home now—I don’t want you here—” her father ordered peremptorily.

The tears sprang to Lois’ eyes. She looked at the fire and the tears were quickly dried by fear. The flames roared and struggled upward. The great wonder of the fire made her forget even her indignation at her father’s light treatment of herself and of her lover. There was a crashing and bursting of timber, as the first floor fell in a mass into the blazing gulf, splashing the fire in all directions, to the terror of the crowd. She saw the steel of the machines growing white-hot and twisting like flaming letters. Piece after piece of the flooring gave way, and the machines dropped in red ruin as the wooden framework burned out. The air became unbreathable; the fog was swallowed up: sparks went rushing up as if they would burn the dark heavens; sometimes cards of lace went whirling into the gulf of the sky, waving with wings of fire. It was dangerous to stand near this great cup of roaring destruction.

Sampson, the grey old manager of Buxton and Co’s, led her away as soon as she would turn her face to listen to him. He was a stout, irritable man. He elbowed his way roughly through the crowd, and Lois followed him, her head high, her lips closed. He led her for some distance without speaking, then at last, unable to contain his garrulous irritability, he broke out:

“What do they expect? What can they expect? They can’t expect to stand a bad time. They spring up like mushrooms as big as a house-side, but there’s no stability in ’em. I remember William Selby when he’d run on my errands. Yes, there’s some as can make much out of little, and there’s some as can make much out of nothing, but they find it won’t last. William Selby’s sprung up in a day, and he’ll vanish in a night. You can’t trust to luck alone. Maybe he thinks it’s a lucky thing this fire has come when things are looking black. But you can’t get out of it as easy as that. There’s been a few too many of ’em. No, indeed, a fire’s the last thing I should hope to come to—the very last!”

Lois hurried and hurried, so that she brought the old manager panting in distress up the steps of her home. She could not bear to hear him talking so. They could get no one to open the door for some time. When at last Lois ran upstairs, she found her mother dressed, but all unbuttoned again, lying back in the chair in her daughter’s room, suffering from palpitation of the heart, with Sesame and Lilies crushed beneath her. Lois administered brandy, and her decisive words and movements helped largely to bring the good lady to a state of recovery sufficient to allow of her returning to her own bedroom.

Then Lois locked the door. She glanced at her fire-darkened face, and taking the flattened Ruskin out of the chair, sat down and wept. After a while she calmed herself, rose, and sponged her face. Then once more on that fatal night she prepared for rest. Instead, however, or retiring, she pulled a silk quilt from her disordered bed and wrapping it round her, sat miserably to think. It was two o’clock in the morning.

四

第二天醒来，洛伊斯又在想着昨晚的事。她有一点儿怀疑威尔，因为他说过要去工厂看看，而她又要不要替他保守这个秘密呢？她认定威尔是有罪的，她感觉他们之间算是完了。

下楼去吃早饭时洛伊斯看到了父亲，便问了问情况，父亲说家里没什么损失，但她的弟弟还没回来。父亲的言语中有些怀疑威尔。洛伊斯很受不了，便哭着出了屋。她叫上一个女仆和她一起上街去了。烧毁的工厂黑乎乎一片，到处是断瓦残垣，令人毛骨悚然。洛伊斯看着眼前景象，悲从中来，不禁胡思乱想：要真是他干的，就让他烧死在那儿好了，那样他就可以活在自己的心里了。

女仆突然惊叫起来，她顺着看过去，远处她的弟弟和威尔正一起朝她走来。洛伊斯跳上前去大声问他们到底去哪儿了。两人装疯卖傻地替自己开脱着，原来，他们和另外两个公子哥儿到家禽街闲逛去了。她们遇上了一个卖鹅女，他们调戏那个卖鹅女，引起了她的叫骂。这时，周围的小贩一起过来掺和助威，和他们几个打起架来。后来警察来了，就把他们都带走了。

洛伊斯一路听着他们的讲述，尽管这是件不光彩的事情，但他们总算与纵火案无关了。洛伊斯控制着情绪，冷冷地责备了他们。威尔满脸脏兮兮地没个人样，但是听说大家误以为他是纵火犯时，倒还像洗清了冤屈一般得意起来。

Ⅳ

he fire was sunk to cold ashes in the grate, and the grey morning was creeping through the half-opened curtains like a thing ashamed, when Lois awoke. It was painful to move her head: her neck was cramped. The girl awoke in full recollection. She sighed, roused herself and pulled the quilt closer about her. For a little while she sat and mused. A pale, tragic resignation fixed her face like a mask. She remembered her father’s irritable answer to her question concerning her lover’s safety—“Safe, aye—why not?” She knew that he suspected the factory of having been purposely set on fire. But then, he had never liked Will. And yet—and yet—Lois’ heart was heavy as lead. She felt her lover was guilty. And she felt she must hide her secret of his last communication to her. She saw herself being cross-examined—“When did you last see this man?” But she would hide what he had said about watching at the works. How dreary it was—and how dreadful. Her life was ruined now, and nothing mattered any more. She must only behave with dignity, and submit to her own obliteration. For even if Will were never accused, she knew in her heart he was guilty. She knew it was over between them.

It was dawn among the yellow fog outside, and Lois, as she moved mechanically about her toilet, vaguely felt that all her days would arrive slowly struggling through a bleak fog. She felt an intense longing at this uncanny hour to slough the body’s trammelled weariness and to issue at once into the new bright warmth of the far Dawn where a lover waited transfigured; it is so easy and pleasant in imagination to step out of the chill grey dampness of another terrestrial daybreak, straight into the sunshine of the eternal morning! And who can escape his hour? So Lois performed the meaningless routine of her toilet, which at last she made meaningful when she took her black dress, and fastened a black jet brooch at her throat.

Then she went downstairs and found her father eating a mutton chop. She quickly approached and kissed him on the forehead. Then she retreated to the other end of the table. Her father looked tired, even haggard.

“You are early,” he said, after a while. Lois did not reply. Her father continued to eat for a few moments, then he said:

“Have a chop—here’s one! Ring for a hot plate. Eh, what? Why not?”

Lois was insulted, but she gave no sign. She sat down and took a cup of coffee, making no pretence to eat. Her father was absorbed, and had forgotten her.

“Our Jack’s not come home yet,” he said at last.

Lois stirred faintly. “Hasn’t he?” she said.

“No.” There was silence for a time. Lois was frightened. Had something happened also to her brother? This fear was closer and more irksome.

“Selby’s was cleaned out, gutted. We had a near shave of it—”

“You have no loss, Dadda?”

“Nothing to mention.” After another silence, her father said:

“I’d rather be myself than William Selby. Of course it may merely be bad luck—you don’t know. But whatever it was, I wouldn’t like to add one to the list of fires just now. Selby was at the ‘George’ when it broke out—I don’t know where the lad was—!”

“Father,” broke in Lois, “why do you talk like that? Why do you talk as if Will had done it?” She ended suddenly. Her father looked at her pale, mute face.

“I don’t talk as if Will had done it,” he said. “I don’t even think it.”

Feeling she was going to cry, Lois rose and left the room. Her father sighed, and leaning his elbows on his knees, whistled faintly into the fire. He was not thinking about her.

Lois went down to the kitchen and asked Lucy, the parlour-maid, to go out with her. She somehow shrank from going alone, lest people should stare at her overmuch: and she felt an overpowering impulse to go to the scene of the tragedy, to judge for herself.

The churches were chiming half-past eight when the young lady and the maid set off down the street. Nearer the fair, swarthy, thin-legged men were pushing barrels of water towards the market-place, and the gipsy women, with hard brows, and dressed in tight velvet bodices, hurried along the pavement with jugs of milk, and great brass water ewers and loaves and breakfast parcels. People were just getting up, and in the poorer streets was a continual splash of tea-leaves, flung out on to the cobble-stones. A teapot came crashing down from an upper story just behind Lois, and she, starting round and looking up, thought that the trembling, drink-bleared man at the upper window, who was stupidly staring after his pot, had had designs on her life; and she went on her way shuddering at the grim tragedy of life.

In the dull October morning the ruined factory was black and ghastly. The window-frames were all jagged, and the walls stood gaunt. Inside was a tangle of twisted débris, the iron, in parts red with bright rust, looking still hot; the charred wood was black and satiny; from dishevelled heaps, sodden with water, a faint smoke rose dimly. Lois stood and looked. If he had done that! He might even be dead there, burned to ash and lost for ever. It was almost soothing to feel so. He would be safe in the eternity which now she must hope in.

At her side the pretty, sympathetic maid chatted plaintively. Suddenly, from one of her lapses into silence, she exclaimed:

“Why if there isn’t Mr Jack!”

Lois turned suddenly and saw her brother and her lover approaching her. Both looked soiled, untidy and wan. Will had a black eye, some ten hours old, well coloured. Lois turned very pale as they approached. They were looking gloomily at the factory, and for a moment did not notice the girls.

“I’ll be jiggered if there ain’t our Lois!” exclaimed Jack, the reprobate, swearing under his breath.

“Oh, God!” exclaimed the other in disgust.

“Jack, where have you been?” said Lois sharply, in keen pain, not looking at her lover. Her sharp tone of suffering drove her lover to defend himself with an affectation of comic recklessness.

“In quod,” replied her brother, smiling sickly.

“Jack!” cried his sister very sharply.

“Fact.”

Will Selby shuffled on his feet and smiled, trying to turn away his face so that she should not see his black eye. She glanced at him. He felt her boundless anger and contempt, and with great courage he looked straight at her, smiling ironically. Unfortunately his smile would not go over his swollen eye, which remained grave and lurid.

“Do I look pretty?” he inquired with a hateful twist of his lip.

“Very!” she replied.

“I thought I did,” he replied. And he turned to look at his father’s ruined works, and he felt miserable and stubborn. The girl standing there so clean and out of it all! Oh, God, he felt sick. He turned to go home.

The three went together, Lois silent in anger and resentment. Her brother was tired and overstrung, but not suppressed. He chattered on blindly.

“It was a lark we had! We met Bob Osborne and Freddy Mansell coming down Poultry. There was girl with some geese. She looked a tanger sitting there, all like statues, her and the geese. It was Will who began it. He offered her three-pence and asked her to begin the show. She called him a—she called him something, and then somebody poked an old gander to stir him up, and somebody squirted him in the eye. He upped and squawked and started off with his neck out. Laugh! We nearly killed ourselves, keeping back those old birds with squirts and teasers. Oh, Lum! Those old geese, oh, scrimmy, they didn’t know where to turn, they fairly went off their dots, coming at us right an’ left, and such a row— it was fun, you never knew! Then the girl she got up and knocked somebody over the jaw, and we were right in for it. Well, in the end, Billy here got hold of her round the waist—”

“Oh, dry it up!” exclaimed Will bitterly.

Jack looked at him, laughed mirthlessly, and continued: “An’ we said we’d buy her birds. So we got hold of one goose apiece—an’ they took some holding, I can tell you—and off we set round the fair, Billy leading with the girl. The bloomin’ geese squawked an’ pecked. Laugh—I thought I should a’ died. Well, then we wanted the girl to have her birds back—and then she fired up. She got some other chaps on her side, and there was a proper old row. The girl went tooth and nail for Will there—she was dead set against him. She gave him a black eye, by gum, and we went at it, I can tell you. It was a free fight, a beauty, an’ we got run in. I don’t know what became of the girl.”

Lois surveyed the two men. There was no glimmer of a smile on her face, though the maid behind her was sniggering. Will was very bitter. He glanced at his sweetheart and at the ruined factory.

“How’s dad taken it?” he asked, in a biting, almost humble tone.

“I don’t know,” she replied coldly. “Father’s in an awful way. I believe everybody thinks you set the place on fire.”

Lois drew herself up. She had delivered her blow. She drew herself up in cold condemnation and for a moment enjoyed her complete revenge. He was despicable, abject in his dishevelled, disfigured, unwashed condition.

“Aye, well, they made a mistake for once,” he replied, with a curl of the lip.

Curiously enough, they walked side by side as if they belonged to each other. She was his conscience-keeper. She was far from forgiving him, but she was still farther from letting him go. And he walked at her side like a boy who had to be punished before he can be exonerated. He submitted. But there was a genuine bitter contempt in the curl of his lip.干草垛里的爱情

Love Among the Haystacks

一

绿油油的田野上生机盎然，半山腰堆着一个巨大的干草垛。天气炎热，一对兄弟坐在草垛边歇凉，等待着马车从山下运干草上来，他们负责将那些干草码成垛。

弟弟莫里斯二十一岁，相貌英俊，生性活泼，有点儿大大咧咧，此时正调侃着哥哥。哥哥杰弗里大他一岁，有点敏感，一边招架着弟弟的讥讽，一边毫不示弱地反唇相讥。

哥俩儿似乎在讨论着他们共同看上的一位姑娘，那是一位波兰姑娘，名叫波拉·雅布罗诺斯基，是附近牧师家的家庭教师。本来是哥哥杰弗里先认识那姑娘的，但弟弟却后来居上，原因就是在一天晚上，杰弗里只留下了弟弟在干草垛守夜，自己离开了，但这恰好给了弟弟一个机会结识波拉。现在波拉爱恋着莫里斯。看着弟弟与心爱的姑娘卿卿我我，杰弗里心中不免懊悔和嫉妒。他嘴上虽还在逞强，但目光却不免朝牧师家望去。姑娘此刻正站在那儿。这时，弟弟也看到了姑娘，便朝她挥手；姑娘为了不被挡住视线，迅速爬上树也向着莫里斯挥手。杰弗里看不惯，讥讽了弟弟一句，莫里斯又要顾着姑娘，又要和哥哥拌嘴，一个没站稳跌了个趔趄。此时，他们的父亲赶车运干草上来了，看到哥俩儿这般模样，不禁笑了笑。

父子三人开始干活。父亲卸货，杰弗里搬运，莫里斯码草垛。但是父亲和杰弗里搬得太快，莫里斯又要码又要接，有点儿忙不过来了，便向哥哥抱怨，叫他不要乱扔。杰弗里看到弟弟这狼狈样，心中颇有些痛快，更加快了搬草速度。

终于卸完了，杰弗里看着草垛的一个角，说那里码得松了，便使劲推了推。这一下把还在草垛上面站着的莫里斯弄得直晃悠。莫里斯生气了，二人在草垛上扭打起来，莫里斯一不留神被推下了草垛。

杰弗里着了慌，看见下面没有动静，便大喊父亲。站在远处树上的波拉看见了这一幕，担心地哭喊起来。父亲和大哥亨利闻讯赶来，在一个角落里发现了刚缓过神的莫里斯，把他扶了起来。这时，许多人赶了过来，牧师、雇工，还有抽抽搭搭的波拉姑娘。大家七手八脚地围着莫里斯忙碌着。此时，杰弗里恨不得找个地缝钻进去。而波拉还唯恐天下不乱，口口声声说亲眼看见是哥哥把弟弟推下去的，这一下更让杰弗里觉得自己像个罪犯。

但是苏醒过来的莫里斯否认了这回事，说波拉看错了，父亲和众人才长舒了一口气。活泼热情的波拉倒是无所谓，只要心上人安全无恙就好；但她家主人却早就看不惯这个感情奔放的女孩子了，于是对莫里斯的父亲说，他们打算再过三星期合约期满就辞退她。波拉浑然不觉，依然安抚着情郎。莫里斯躺在她的臂弯里，十分受用。

Ⅰ

he two large fields lay on a hillside facing south. Being newly cleared of hay, they were golden green, and they shone almost blindingly in the sunlight. Across the hill, half-way up, ran a high hedge, that flung its black shadow finely across the molten glow of the sward. The stack was being built just above the hedge. It was of great size, massive, but so silvery and delicately bright in tone that it seemed not to have weight. It rose dishevelled and radiant among the steady, golden-green glare of the field. A little farther back was another, finished stack.

The empty wagon was just passing through the gap in the hedge. From the far-off corner of the bottom field, where the sward was still striped grey with windrows, the loaded wagon launched forward, to climb the hill to the stack. The white dots of the hay-makers showed distinctly among the hay.

The two brothers were having a moment’s rest, waiting for the load to come up. They stood wiping their brows with their arms, sighing from the heat and the labour of placing the last load. The stack they rode was high, lifting them up above the hedge-tops, and very broad, a great slightly-hollowed vessel into which the sunlight poured, in which the hot, sweet scent of hay was suffocating. Small and inefficacious the brothers looked, half-submerged in the loose, great trough, lifted high up as if on an altar reared to the sun.

Maurice, the younger brother, was a handsome young fellow of twenty-one, careless and debonair, and full of vigour. His grey eyes, as he taunted his brother, were bright and baffled with a strong emotion. His swarthy face had the same peculiar smile, expectant and glad and nervous, of a young man roused for the first time in passion.

“Tha sees,” he said, as he leaned on the pommel of his fork, “tha thowt as tha’d done me one, didna ter?” He smiled as he spoke, then fell again into his pleasant torment of musing.

“I thought nowt—tha knows so much,” retorted Geoffrey, with the touch of a sneer. His brother had the better of him. Geoffrey was a very heavy, hulking fellow, a year older than Maurice. His blue eyes were unsteady, they glanced away quickly; his mouth was morbidly sensitive. One felt him wince away, through the whole of his great body. His inflamed self-consciousness was a disease in him.

“Ah but though, I know tha did,” mocked Maurice. “Tha went slinkin’ off”—Geoffrey winced convulsively—“thinking as that wor the last night as any of us’ud ha’e ter stop here, an’ so tha’d leave me to sleep out, though it wor thy turn—”

He smiled to himself, thinking of the result of Geoffrey’s ruse.

“I didna go slinkin’ off neither,” retorted Geoffrey, in his heavy, clumsy manner, wincing at the phrase. “Didna my feyther send me to fetch some coal—”

“Oh yes, oh yes—we know all about it. But tha sees what tha missed, my lad.”

Maurice, chuckling, threw himself on his back in the bed of hay. There was absolutely nothing in his world, then, except the shallow ramparts of the stack, and the blazing sky. He clenched his fists tight, threw his arms across his face, and braced his muscles again. He was evidently very much moved, so acutely that it was hardly pleasant, though he still smiled. Geoffrey, standing behind him, could just see his red mouth, with the young moustache like black fur, curling back and showing the teeth in a smile. The elder brother leaned his chin on the pommel of his fork, looking out across the country.

Far away was the faint blue heap of Nottingham. Between, the country lay under a haze of heat, with here and there a flag of colliery smoke waving. But near at hand, at the foot of the hill, across the deep-hedged high road, was only the silence of the old church and the castle farm, among their trees. The large view only made Geoffrey more sick. He looked away, to the wagons crossing the field below him, the empty cart like a big insect moving down hill, the load coming up, rocking like a ship, the brown head of the horse ducking, the brown knees lifted and planted strenuously. Geoffrey wished it would be quick.

“Tha didna think—”

Geoffrey started, coiled within himself, and looked down at the handsome lips moving in speech below the brown arms of his brother.

“Tha didna think ‘er’d be thur wi’ me—or tha wouldna ha’ left me to it,” Maurice said, ending with a little laugh of excited memory. Geoffrey flushed with hate, and had an impulse to set his foot on that moving, taunting mouth, which was there below him. There was silence for a time, then, in a peculiar tone of delight, Maurice’s voice came again, spelling out the words, as it were:

“Ich bin klein, mein Herz ist rein, Ist niemand d’rin als Christ allein.”

Maurice chuckled, then, convulsed at a twinge of recollection, keen as pain, he twisted over, pressed himself into the hay.

“Can thee say thy prayers in German?” came his muffled voice.

“I non want,” growled Geoffrey.

Maurice chuckled. His face was quite hidden, and in the dark he was going over again his last night’s experiences.

“What about kissing ‘er under th’ ear, Sonny,” he said, in a curious, uneasy tone. He writhed, still startled and inflamed by his first contact with love.

Geoffrey’s heart swelled within him, and things went dark. He could not see the landscape.

“An’ there’s just a nice two-handful of her bosom,” came the low, provocative tones of Maurice, who seemed to be talking to himself.

The two brothers were both fiercely shy of women, and until this hay harvest, the whole feminine sex had been represented by their mother and in presence of any other women they were dumb louts. Moreover, brought up by a proud mother, a stranger in the country, they held the common girls as beneath them, because beneath their mother, who spoke pure English, and was very quiet. Loud-mouthed and broad-tongued the common girls were. So these two young men had grown up virgin but tormented.

Now again Maurice had the start of Geoffrey, and the elder brother was deeply mortified. There was a danger of his sinking into a morbid state, from sheer lack of living, lack of interest. The foreign governess at the Vicarage, whose garden lay beside the top field, had talked to the lads through the hedge, and had fascinated them. There was a great elder bush, with its broad creamy flowers crumbling on to the garden path, and into the field. Geoffrey never smelled elder-flower without starting and wincing, thinking of the strange foreign voice that had so startled him as he mowed out with the scythe in the hedge bottom. A baby had run through the gap, and the Fr?ulein, calling in German, had come brushing down the flowers in pursuit. She had started so on seeing a man standing there in the shade, that for a moment she could not move: and then she had blundered into the rake which was lying by his side. Geoffrey, forgetting she was a woman when he saw her pitch forward, had picked her up carefully, asking: “Have you hurt you?”

Then she had broken into a laugh, and answered in German, showing him her arms, and knitting her brows. She was nettled rather badly.

“You want a dock leaf,” he said. She frowned in a puzzled fashion.

“A dock leaf?” she repeated. He had rubbed her arms with the green leaf.

And now, she had taken to Maurice. She had seemed to prefer himself at first. Now she had sat with Maurice in the moonlight, and had let him kiss her. Geoffrey sullenly suffered, making no fight.

Unconsciously, he was looking at the Vicarage garden. There she was, in a golden-brown dress. He took off his hat, and held up his right hand in greeting to her. She, a small, golden figure, waved her hand negligently from among the potato rows. He remained, arrested, in the same posture, his hat in his left hand, his right arm upraised, thinking. He could tell by the negligence of her greeting that she was waiting for Maurice. What did she think of himself? Why wouldn’t she have him?

Hearing the voice of the wagoner leading the load, Maurice rose. Geoffrey still stood in the same way, but his face was sullen, and his upraised hand was slack with brooding. Maurice faced up-hill. His eyes lit up and he laughed. Geoffrey dropped his own arm, watching.

“Lad!” chuckled Maurice. “I non knowed ‘er wor there.” He waved his hand clumsily. In these matters Geoffrey did better. The elder brother watched the girl. She ran to the end of the path, behind the bushes, so that she was screened from the house. Then she waved her handkerchief wildly. Maurice did not notice the manoeuvre. There was the cry of a child. The girl’s figure vanished, reappeared holding up a white childish bundle, and came down the path. There she put down her charge, sped up-hill to a great ash-tree, climbed quickly to a large horizontal bar that formed the fence there, and, standing poised, blew kisses with both her hands, in a foreign fashion that excited the brothers. Maurice laughed aloud, as he waved his red handkerchief.

“Well, what’s the danger?” shouted a mocking voice from below. Maurice collapsed, blushing furiously.

“Nowt!” he called.

There was a hearty laugh from below.

The load rode up, sheered with a hiss against the stack, then sank back again upon the scotches. The brothers ploughed across the mass of hay, taking the forks. Presently a big, burly man, red and glistening, climbed to the top of the load. Then he turned round, scrutinized the hillside from under his shaggy brows. He caught sight of the girl under the ash-tree.

“Oh, that’s who it is,” he laughed. “I thought it was some such bird, but I couldn’t see her.”

The father laughed in a hearty, chaffing way, then began to teem the load. Geoffrey, on the stack above, received his great forkfuls, and swung them over to Maurice, who took them, placed them, building the stack. In the intense sunlight, the three worked in silence, knit together in a brief passion of work. The father stirred slowly for a moment, getting the hay from under his feet. Geoffrey waited, the blue tines of his fork glittering in expectation: the mass rose, his fork swung beneath it, there was a light clash of blades, then the hay was swept on to the stack, caught by Maurice, who placed it judiciously. One after another, the shoulders of the three men bowed and braced themselves. All wore light blue, bleached shirts, that stuck close to their backs. The father moved mechanically, his thick, rounded shoulders bending and lifting dully: he worked monotonously. Geoffrey flung away his strength. His massive shoulders swept and flung the hay extravagantly.

“Dost want to knock me over?” asked Maurice angrily. He had to brace himself against the impact. The three men worked intensely, as if some will urged them. Maurice was light and swift at the work, but he had to use his judgement. Also, when he had to place the hay along the far ends, he had some distance to carry it. So he was too slow for Geoffrey. Ordinarily, the elder would have placed the hay as far as possible where his brother wanted it. Now, however, he pitched his forkfuls into the middle of the stack. Maurice strode swiftly and handsomely across the bed, but the work was too much for him. The other two men, clenched in their receive and deliver, kept up a high pitch of labour. Geoffrey still flung the hay at random. Maurice was perspiring heavily with heat and exertion, and was getting worried. Now and again, Geoffrey wiped his arm across his brow, mechanically, like an animal. Then he glanced with satisfaction at Maurice’s moiled condition, and caught the next forkful.

“Wheer dost think thou’rt hollin’ it, fool!” panted Maurice, as his brother flung a forkful out of reach.

“Wheer I’ve a mind,” answered Geoffrey.

Maurice toiled on, now very angry. He felt the sweat trickling down his body: drops fell into his long black lashes, blinding him, so that he had to stop and angrily dash his eyes clear. The veins stood out in his swarthy neck. He felt he would burst, or drop, if the work did not soon slacken off. He heard his father’s fork dully scrape the cart bottom.

“There, the last,” the father panted. Geoffrey tossed the last light lot at random, took off his hat, and, steaming in the sunshine as he wiped himself, stood complacently watching Maurice struggle with clearing the bed.

“Don’t you think you’ve got your bottom corner a bit far out?” came the father’s voice from below. “You’d better be drawing in now, hadn’t you?”

“I thought you said next load,” Maurice called, sulkily.

“Aye! All right. But isn’t this bottom corner—?”

Maurice, impatient, took no notice.

Geoffrey strode over the stack, and stuck his fork in the offending corner. “What—here?” he bawled in his great voice.

“Aye—isn’t it a bit loose?” came the irritating voice.

Geoffrey pushed his fork in the jutting corner, and, leaning his weight on the handle, shoved. He thought it shook. He thrust again with all his power. The mass swayed.

“What art up to, tha fool!” cried Maurice, in a high voice.

“Mind who tha’rt callin’ a fool,” said Geoffrey, and he prepared to push again. Maurice sprang across, and elbowed his brother aside. On the yielding, swaying bed of hay, Geoffrey lost his foothold, and fell grovelling. Maurice tried the corner.

“It’s solid enough,” he shouted angrily.

“Aye—all right,” came the conciliatory voice of the father; “you do get a bit of rest now there’s such a long way to cart it,” he added reflectively.

Geoffrey had got to his feet.

“Tha’ll mind who tha’rt nudging, I can tell thee,” he threatened heavily; adding, as Maurice continued to work, “an’ tha non ca’s him a fool again, dost hear?”

“Not till next time,” sneered Maurice.

As he worked silently round the stack, he neared where his brother stood like a sullen statue, leaning on his fork-handle, looking out over the countryside. Maurice’s heart quickened in its beat. He worked forward, until a point of his fork caught in the leather of Geoffrey’s boot, and the metal rang sharply.

“Are ter going ta shift thysen?” asked Maurice threateningly. There was no reply from the great block. Maurice lifted his upper lip like a dog. Then he put out his elbow, and tried to push his brother into the stack, clear of his way.

“Who are ter shovin’?” came the deep, dangerous voice.

“Tha?gh,” replied Maurice, with a sneer, and straightway the two brothers set themselves against each other, like opposing bulls, Maurice trying his hardest to shift Geoffrey from his footing, Geoffrey leaning all his weight in resistance. Maurice, insecure in his footing, staggered a little, and Geoffrey’s weight followed him. He went slithering over the edge of the stack.

Geoffrey turned white to the lips, and remained standing, listening. He heard the fall. Then a flush of darkness came over him, and he remained standing only because he was planted. He had not strength to move. He could hear no sound from below, was only faintly aware of a sharp shriek from a long way off. He listened again. Then he filled with sudden panic.

“Feyther!” he roared, in his tremendous voice: “Feyther! Feyther!”

The valley re-echoed with the sound. Small cattle on the hill-side looked up. Men’s figures came running from the bottom field, and much nearer a woman’s figure was racing across the upper field. Geoffrey waited in terrible suspense.

“Ah-h!” he heard the strange, wild voice of the girl cry out. “Ah-h!”—and then some foreign wailing speech. Then: “Ah-h! Are you dea-ed!”

He stood sullenly erect on the stack, not daring to go down, longing to hide in the hay, but too sullen to stoop out of sight. He heard his eldest brother come up, panting:

“Whatever’s amiss!” and then the labourer, and then his father.

“Whatever have you been doing?” he heard his father ask, while yet he had not come round the corner of the stack. And then, in a low, bitter tone:

“Eh, he’s done for! I’d no business to ha’ put it all on that stack.”

There was a moment or two of silence, then the voice of Henry, the eldest brother, said crisply:

“He’s not dead—he’s coming round.”

Geoffrey heard, but was not glad. He had as lief Maurice were dead. At least that would be final: better than meeting his brother’s charges, and of seeing his mother pass to the sick-room. If Maurice was killed, he himself would not explain, no, not a word, and they could hang him if they liked. If Maurice were only hurt, then everybody would know, and Geoffrey could never lift his face again. What added torture, to pass along, everybody knowing. He wanted something that he could stand back to, something definite, if it were only the knowledge that he had killed his brother. He MUST have something firm to back up to, or he would go mad. He was so lonely, he who above all needed the support of sympathy.

“No, he’s commin’ to; I tell you he is,” said the labourer.

“He’s not dea-ed, he’s not dea-ed,” came the passionate, strange sing-song of the foreign girl. “He’s not dead—no-o.”

“He wants some brandy—look at the colour of his lips,” said the crisp, cold voice of Henry. “Can you fetch some?”

“Wha-at? Fetch?” Fr?ulein did not understand.

“Brandy,” said Henry, very distinct.

“Brrandy!” she re-echoed.

“You go, Bill,” groaned the father.

“Aye, I’ll go,” replied Bill, and he ran across the field.

Maurice was not dead, nor going to die. This Geoffrey now realized. He was glad after all that the extreme penalty was revoked. But he hated to think of himself going on. He would always shrink now. He had hoped and hoped for the time when he would be careless, bold as Maurice, when he would not wince and shrink. Now he would always be the same, coiling up in himself like a tortoise with no shell.

“Ah-h! He’s getting better!” came the wild voice of the Fr?ulein, and she began to cry, a strange sound, that startled the men, made the animal bristle within them. Geoffrey shuddered as he heard, between her sobbing, the impatient moaning of his brother as the breath came back.

The labourer returned at a run, followed by the Vicar. After the brandy, Maurice made more moaning, hiccuping noise. Geoffrey listened in torture. He heard the Vicar asking for explanations. All the united, anxious voices replied in brief phrases.

“It was that other,” cried the Fr?ulein. “He knocked him over— Ha!”

She was shrill and vindictive.

“I don’t think so,” said the father to the Vicar, in a quite audible but private tone, speaking as if the Fr?ulein did not understand his English.

The Vicar addressed his children’s governess in bad German. She replied in a torrent which he would not confess was too much for him. Maurice was making little moaning, sighing noises.

“Where’s your pain, boy, eh?” the father asked, pathetically.

“Leave him alone a bit,” came the cool voice of Henry. “He’s winded, if no more.”

“You’d better see that no bones are broken,” said the anxious Vicar.

“It wor a blessing as he should a dropped on that heap of hay just there,” said the labourer. “If he’d happened to ha’ catched hisself on this nog o’ wood ‘e wouldna ha’ stood much chance.”

Geoffrey wondered when he would have courage to venture down. He had wild notions of pitching himself head foremost from the stack: if he could only extinguish himself, he would be safe. Quite frantically, he longed not to be. The idea of going through life thus coiled up within himself in morbid self-consciousness, always lonely, surly, and a misery, was enough to make him cry out. What would they all think when they knew he had knocked Maurice off that high stack?

They were talking to Maurice down below. The lad had recovered in great measure, and was able to answer faintly.

“Whatever was you doin’?” the father asked gently. “Was you playing about with our Geoffrey?—Aye, and where is he?”

Geoffrey’s heart stood still.

“I dunno,” said Henry, in a curious, ironic tone.

“Go an’ have a look,” pleaded the father, infinitely relieved over one son, anxious now concerning the other. Geoffrey could not bear that his eldest brother should climb up and question him in his high-pitched drawl of curiosity. The culprit doggedly set his feet on the ladder. His nailed boots slipped a rung.

“Mind yourself,” shouted the overwrought father.

Geoffrey stood like a criminal at the foot of the ladder, glancing furtively at the group. Maurice was lying, pale and slightly convulsed, upon a heap of hay. The Fr?ulein was kneeling beside his head. The Vicar had the lad’s shirt full open down the breast, and was feeling for broken ribs. The father kneeled on the other side, the labourer and Henry stood aside.

“I can’t find anything broken,” said the Vicar, and he sounded slightly disappointed.

“There’s nowt broken to find,” murmured Maurice, smiling.

The father started. “Eh?” he said. “Eh?” and he bent over the invalid.

“I say it’s not hurt me,” repeated Maurice.

“What were you doing?” asked the cold, ironic voice of Henry. Geoffrey turned his head away: he had not yet raised his face.

“Nowt as I know on,” he muttered in a surly tone.

“Why!” cried Fr?ulein in a reproachful tone. “I see him—knock him over!” She made a fierce gesture with her elbow. Henry curled his long moustache sardonically.

“Nay lass, niver,” smiled the wan Maurice. “He was fur enough away from me when I slipped.”

“Oh, ah!” cried the Fr?ulein, not understanding.

“Yi,” smiled Maurice indulgently.

“I think you’re mistaken,” said the father, rather pathetically, smiling at the girl as if she were “wanting”.

“Oh no,” she cried. “I see him.”

“Nay, lass,” smiled Maurice quietly.

She was a Pole, named Paula Jablonowsky: young, only twenty years old, swift and light as a wild cat, with a strange, wild-cat way of grinning. Her hair was blonde and full of life, all crisped into many tendrils with vitality, shaking round her face. Her fine blue eyes were peculiarly lidded, and she seemed to look piercingly, then languorously, like a wild cat. She had somewhat Slavonic cheekbones, and was very much freckled. It was evident that the Vicar, a pale, rather cold man, hated her.

Maurice lay pale and smiling in her lap, whilst she cleaved to him like a mate. One felt instinctively that they were mated. She was ready at any minute to fight with ferocity in his defence, now he was hurt. Her looks at Geoffrey were full of fierceness. She bowed over Maurice and caressed him with her foreign-sounding English.

“You say what you lai-ike,” she laughed, giving him lordship over her.

“Hadn’t you better be going and looking what has become of Margery?” asked the Vicar in tones of reprimand.

“She is with her mother—I heared her. I will go in a whai-ile,” smiled the girl, coolly.

“Do you feel as if you could stand?” asked the father, still anxiously.

“Aye, in a bit,” smiled Maurice.

“You want to get up?” caressed the girl, bowing over him, till her face was not far from his.

“I’m in no hurry,” he replied, smiling brilliantly.

This accident had given him quite a strange new ease, an authority. He felt extraordinarily glad. New power had come to him all at once.

“You in no hurry,” she repeated, gathering his meaning. She smiled tenderly: she was in his service.

“She leaves us in another month—Mrs Inwood could stand no more of her,” apologized the Vicar quietly to the father.

“Why, is she—?”

“Like a wild thing—disobedient, and insolent.”

“Ha!”

The father sounded abstract.

“No more foreign governesses for me.”

Maurice stirred, and looked up at the girl.

“You stand up?” she asked brightly. “You well?”

He laughed again, showing his teeth winsomely. She lifted his head, sprung to her feet, her hands still holding his head, then she took him under the armpits and had him on his feet before anyone could help. He was much taller than she. He grasped her strong shoulders heavily, leaned against her, and, feeling her round, firm breast doubled up against his side, he smiled, catching his breath.

“You see I’m all right,” he gasped. “I was only winded.”

“You all right?” she cried, in great glee.

“Yes, I am.”

He walked a few steps after a moment.

“There’s nowt ails me, Father,” he laughed.

“Quite well, you?” she cried in a pleading tone. He laughed outright, looked down at her, touching her cheek with his fingers.

“That’s it—if tha likes.”

“If I lai-ike!” she repeated, radiant.

“She’s going at the end of three weeks,” said the Vicar consolingly to the farmer.

二

正午时分，父亲让莫里斯坐在原地休息，叫其他人各忙各的，波拉便回去了。莫里斯此时已决定向她求婚。不一会儿，大家都来给莫里斯送晚饭。伍基一家的男丁们——父亲伍基先生、大哥亨利、还有伍基家的另外四个儿子：杰弗里、莫里斯、吉姆和比尔——都聚在干草垛旁边的守夜棚子里用餐。

这时，波拉提着篮子，带着鸡肉来看望莫里斯了。大家都冲她笑，而莫里斯很害羞。大家和波拉聊着天，询问她的身世。

不一会儿，有个流浪汉进来找活干。大家说这里不缺人手，但流浪汉却赖着不肯走，并且向他们讨吃的。于是众人便给他分了一些面包。不一会儿，流浪汉的妻子也跟进来了，尽管她也饿着肚子，但是却没有接受大家的施舍，默默走出去了。看着这场景，波拉起身告辞，亨利也号召大家起来干活去，并对眼前这个很不识趣的流浪汉下了逐客令。

Ⅱ

hile they were talking, they heard the far-off hooting of a pit.

“There goes th’ loose a’,” said Henry, coldly. “We’re not going to get that corner up today.”

The father looked round anxiously.

“Now, Maurice, are you sure you’re all right?” he asked.

“Yes, I’m all right. Haven’t I told you?”

“Then you sit down there, and in a bit you can be getting dinner out. Henry, you go on the stack. Wheer’s Jim? Oh, he’s minding the hosses. Bill, and you, Geoffrey, you can pick while Jim loads.”

Maurice sat down under the wych elm to recover. The Fr?ulein had fled back. He made up his mind to ask her to marry him. He had got fifty pounds of his own, and his mother would help him. For a long time he sat musing, thinking what he would do. Then, from the float he fetched a big basket covered with a cloth, and spread the dinner. There was an immense rabbit pie, a dish of cold potatoes, much bread, a great piece of cheese, and a solid rice pudding.

These two fields were four miles from the home farm. But they had been in the hands of the Wookeys for several generations, therefore the father kept them on, and everyone looked forward to the hay harvest at Greasley: it was a kind of picnic. They brought dinner and tea in the milk-float, which the father drove over in the morning. The lads and the labourers cycled. Off and on, the harvest lasted a fortnight. As the high road from Alfreton to Nottingham ran at the foot of the fields, someone usually slept in the hay under the shed to guard the tools. The sons took it in turns. They did not care for it much, and were for that reason anxious to finish the harvest on this day. But work went slack and disjointed after Maurice’s accident.

When the load was teemed, they gathered round the white cloth, which was spread under a tree between the hedge and the stack, and, sitting on the ground, ate their meal. Mrs Wookey sent always a clean cloth, and knives and forks and plates for everybody. Mr Wookey was always rather proud of this spread: everything was so proper.

“There now,” he said, sitting down jovially. “Doesn’t this look nice now—eh?”

They all sat round the white spread, in the shadow of the tree and the stack, and looked out up the fields as they ate. From their shady coolness, the gold sward seemed liquid, molten with heat. The horse with the empty wagon wandered a few yards, then stood feeding. Everything was still as a trance. Now and again, the horse between the shafts of the load that stood propped beside the stack, jingled his loose bit as he ate. The men ate and drank in silence, the father reading the newspaper, Maurice leaning back on a saddle, Henry reading the Nation, the others eating busily.

Presently “Helloa! ’Er’s ’ere again!” exclaimed Bill. All looked up. Paula was coming across the field carrying a plate.

“She’s bringing something to tempt your appetite, Maurice,” said the eldest brother ironically. Maurice was midway through a large wedge of rabbit pie, and some cold potatoes.

“Aye, bless me if she’s not,” laughed the father. “Put that away, Maurice, it’s a shame to disappoint her.”

Maurice looked round very shamefaced, not knowing what to do with his plate.

“Give it over here,” said Bill. “I’ll polish him off.”

“Bringing something for the invalid?” laughed the father to the Fr?ulein. “He’s looking up nicely.”

“I bring him some chicken, him!” She nodded her head at Maurice childishly. He flushed and smiled.

“Tha doesna mean ter bust ’im,” said Bill.

Everybody laughed aloud. The girl did not understand, so she laughed also. Maurice ate his portion very sheepishly.

The father pitied his son’s shyness.

“Come here and sit by me,” he said. “Eh, Fr?ulein! Is that what they call you?”

“I sit by you, Father,” she said innocently.

Henry threw his head back and laughed long and noiselessly.

She settled near to the big, handsome man.

“My name,” she said, “is Paula Jablonowsky.”

“Is what?” said the father, and the other men went into roars of laughter.

“Tell me again,” said the father. “Your name—?”

“Paula.”

“Paula? Oh—well, it’s a rum sort of name, eh? His name—” he nodded at his son.

“Maurice—I know.” She pronounced it sweetly, then laughed into the father’s eyes. Maurice blushed to the roots of his hair.

They questioned her concerning her history, and made out that she came from Hanover, that her father was a shop-keeper, and that she had run away from home because she did not like her father. She had gone to Paris.

“Oh,” said the father, now dubious. “And what did you do there?”

“In school—in a young ladies’ school.”

“Did you like it?”

“Oh no—no la?fe—no life!”

“What?”

“When we go out—two and two—all together—no more. Ah, no life, no life.”

“Well, that’s a winder!” exclaimed the father. “No life in Paris! And have you found much life in England?”

“No—ah no. I don’t like it.” She made a grimace at the Vicarage.

“How long have you been in England?”

“Chreestmas—so.”

“And what will you do?”

“I will go to London, or to Paris. Ah, Paris!—Or get married!” She laughed into the father’s eyes.

The father laughed heartily.

“Get married, eh? And who to?”

“I don’t know. I am going away.”

“The country’s too quiet for you?” asked the father.

“Too quiet—hm!” she nodded in assent.

“You wouldn’t care for making butter and cheese?”

“Making butter—hm!” She turned to him with a glad, bright gesture. “I like it.”

“Oh,” laughed the father. “You would, would you?”

She nodded vehemently, with glowing eyes.

“She’d like anything in the shape of a change,” said Henry judicially.

“I think she would,” agreed the father. It did not occur to them that she fully understood what they said. She looked at them closely, then thought with bowed head.

“Hullo!” exclaimed Henry, the alert. A tramp was slouching towards them through the gap. He was a very seedy, slinking fellow, with a tang of horsey braggadocio about him. Small, thin, and ferrety, with a week’s red beard bristling on his pointed chin, he came slouching forward.

“Have yer got a bit of a job goin’?” he asked.

“A bit of a job,” repeated the father. “Why, can’t you see as we’ve a’most done?”

“Aye—but I noticed you was a hand short, an’ I thowt as ‘appen you’d gie me half a day.”

“What, are YOU any good in a hay close?” asked Henry, with a sneer.

The man stood slouching against the haystack. All the others were seated on the floor. He had an advantage.

“I could work aside any on yer,” he bragged.

“Tha looks it,” laughed Bill.

“And what’s your regular trade?” asked the father.

“I’m a jockey by rights. But I did a bit o’ dirty work for a boss o’ mine, an’ I was landed. ‘E got the benefit, I got kicked out. ‘E axed me—an’ then ‘e looked as if ‘e’d never seed me.”

“Did he, though!” exclaimed the father sympathetically.

“‘E did that!” asserted the man.

“But we’ve got nothing for you,” said Henry coldly.

“What does the boss say?” asked the man, impudent.

“No, we’ve no work you can do,” said the father. “You can have a bit o’ something to eat, if you like.”

“I should be glad of it,” said the man.

He was given the chunk of rabbit pie that remained. This he ate greedily. There was something debased, parasitic, about him, which disgusted Henry. The others regarded him as a curiosity.

“That was nice and tasty,” said the tramp, with gusto.

“Do you want a piece of bread ‘n’ cheese?” asked the father.

“It’ll help to fill up,” was the reply.

The man ate this more slowly. The company was embarrassed by his presence, and could not talk. All the men lit their pipes, the meal over.

“So you dunna want any help?” said the tramp at last.

“No—we can manage what bit there is to do.”

“You don’t happen to have a fill of bacca to spare, do you?”

The father gave him a good pinch.

“You’re all right here,” he said, looking round. They resented this familiarity. However, he filled his clay pipe and smoked with the rest.

As they were sitting silent, another figure came through the gap in the hedge, and noiselessly approached. It was a woman. She was rather small and finely made. Her face was small, very ruddy, and comely, save for the look of bitterness and aloofness that it wore. Her hair was drawn tightly back under a sailor hat. She gave an impression of cleanness, of precision and directness.

“Have you got some work?” she asked of her man. She ignored the rest. He tucked his tail between his legs.

“No, they haven’t got no work for me. They’ve just gave me a draw of bacca.”

He was a mean crawl of a man.

“An’ am I goin’ to wait for you out there on the lane all day?”

“You needn’t if you don’t like. You could go on.”

“Well, are you coming?” she asked contemptuously. He rose to his feet in a rickety fashion.

“You needn’t be in such a mighty hurry,” he said. “If you’d wait a bit you might get summat.”

She glanced for the first time over the men. She was quite young, and would have been pretty, were she not so hard and callous-looking.

“Have you had your dinner?” asked the father.

She looked at him with a kind of anger, and turned away. Her face was so childish in its contours, contrasting strangely with her expression.

“Are you coming?” she said to the man.

“He’s had his tuck-in. Have a bit, if you want it,” coaxed the father.

“What have you had?” she flashed to the man.

“He’s had all what was left o’ th’ rabbit pie,” said Geoffrey, in an indignant, mocking tone, “and a great hunk o’ bread an’ cheese.”

“Well, it was gave me,” said the man.

The young woman looked at Geoffrey, and he at her. There was a sort of kinship between them. Both were at odds with the world. Geoffrey smiled satirically. She was too grave, too deeply incensed even to smile.

“There’s a cake here, though—you can have a bit o’ that,” said Maurice blithely.

She eyed him with scorn.

Again she looked at Geoffrey. He seemed to understand her. She turned, and in silence departed. The man remained obstinately sucking at his pipe. Everybody looked at him with hostility.

“We’ll be getting to work,” said Henry, rising, pulling off his coat. Paula got to her feet. She was a little bit confused by the presence of the tramp.

“I go,” she said, smiling brilliantly. Maurice rose and followed her sheepishly.

“A good grind, eh?” said the tramp, nodding after the Fr?ulein. The men only half-understood him, but they hated him.

“Hadn’t you better be getting off?” said Henry.

The man rose obediently. He was all slouching, parasitic insolence. Geoffrey loathed him, longed to exterminate him. He was exactly the worst foe of the hyper-sensitive: insolence without sensibility, preying on sensibility.

“Aren’t you goin’ to give me summat for her? It’s nowt she’s had all day, to my knowin’. She’ll ‘appen eat it if I take it ‘er— though she gets more than I’ve any knowledge of”—this with a lewd wink of jealous spite. “And then tries to keep a tight hand on me,” he sneered, taking the bread and cheese, and stuffing it in his pocket.

三

整个下午，大家都在各自忙碌着。自从吵了架，杰弗里和莫里斯哥俩便互不理睬，但他们的内心深处还是十分敬重对方的。天热难耐，所以活儿干得很慢。这一天是干不完了，所以又要有人留下来守夜。

莫里斯自告奋勇，坚持留下来，为的是晚上能够与波拉约会。因为要哄小孩，所以耽搁了一会儿，晚上九点时分，波拉终于来了。二人花前月下，在田野里奔跑着、嬉戏着，好不快活。在波拉的提议下，二人骑上两匹还没装马鞍的马一路小跑到了山顶。正当他们欣赏着远处灯火阑珊的美丽夜景时，天阴沉起来，要下雨了。他们赶忙骑马跑回了干草垛。快到干草垛时，雨点急急地敲打了下来。莫里斯忙从棚子里拿出苫布，和波拉两人开始给干草垛盖苫布。

Ⅲ

eoffrey worked sullenly all the afternoon, and Maurice did the horse-raking. It was exceedingly hot. So the day wore on, the atmosphere thickened, and the sunlight grew blurred. Geoffrey was picking with Bill—helping to load the wagons from the winrows. He was sulky, though extraordinarily relieved: Maurice would not tell. Since the quarrel neither brother had spoken to the other. But their silence was entirely amicable, almost affectionate. They had both been deeply moved, so much so that their ordinary intercourse was interrupted: but underneath, each felt a strong regard for the other. Maurice was peculiarly happy, his feeling of affection swimming over everything. But Geoffrey was still sullenly hostile to the most part of the world. He felt isolated. The free and easy intercommunication between the other workers left him distinctly alone. And he was a man who could not bear to stand alone, he was too much afraid of the vast confusion of life surrounding him, in which he was helpless. Geoffrey mistrusted himself with everybody.

The work went on slowly. It was unbearably hot, and everyone was disheartened.

“We s’ll have getting-on-for another day of it,” said the father at tea-time, as they sat under the tree.

“Quite a day,” said Henry.

“Somebody’ll have to stop, then,” said Geoffrey. “It ‘ud better be me.”

“Nay, lad, I’ll stop,” said Maurice, and he hid his head in confusion.

“Stop again to-night!” exclaimed the father. “I’d rather you went home.”

“Nay, I’m stoppin’,” protested Maurice.

“He wants to do his courting,” Henry enlightened them.

The father thought seriously about it.

“I don’t know . . .” he mused, rather perturbed.

But Maurice stayed. Towards eight o’clock, after sundown, the men mounted their bicycles, the father put the horse in the float, and all departed. Maurice stood in the gap of the hedge and watched them go, the cart rolling and swinging downhill, over the grass stubble, the cyclists dipping swiftly like shadows in front. All passed through the gate, there was a quick clatter of hoofs on the roadway under the lime trees, and they were gone. The young man was very much excited, almost afraid, at finding himself alone.

Darkness was rising from the valley. Already, up the steep hill the cart-lamps crept indecisively, and the cottage windows were lit. Everything looked strange to Maurice, as if he had not seen it before. Down the hedge a large lime-tree teemed with scent that seemed almost like a voice speaking. It startled him. He caught a breath of the over-sweet fragrance, then stood still, listening expectantly.

Up hill, a horse whinneyed. It was the young mare. The heavy horses went thundering across to the far hedge.

Maurice wondered what to do. He wandered round the deserted stacks restlessly. Heat came in wafts, in thick strands. The evening was a long time cooling. He thought he would go and wash himself. There was a trough of pure water in the hedge bottom. It was filled by a tiny spring that filtered over the brim of the trough down the lush hedge bottom of the lower field. All round the trough, in the upper field, the land was marshy, and there the meadow-sweet stood like clots of mist, very sickly-smelling in the twilight. The night did not darken, for the moon was in the sky, so that as the tawny colour drew off the heavens they remained pallid with a dimmed moon. The purple bell-flowers in the hedge went black, the ragged robin turned its pink to a faded white, the meadow-sweet gathered light as if it were phosphorescent, and it made the air ache with scent.

Maurice kneeled on the slab of stone bathing his hands and arms, then his face. The water was deliriously cool. He had still an hour before Paula would come: she was not due till nine. So he decided to take his bath at night instead of waiting till morning. Was he not sticky, and was not Paula coming to talk to him? He was delighted the thought had occurred to him. As he soused his head in the trough, he wondered what the little creatures that lived in the velvety silt at the bottom would think of the taste of soap. Laughing to himself, he squeezed his cloth into the water. He washed himself from head to foot, standing in the fresh, forsaken corner of the field, where no one could see him by daylight, so that now, in the veiled grey tinge of moonlight, he was no more noticeable than the crowded flowers. The night had on a new look: he never remembered to have seen the lustrous grey sheen of it before, nor to have noticed how vital the lights looked, like live folk inhabiting the silvery spaces. And the tall trees, wrapped obscurely in their mantles, would not have surprised him had they begun to move in converse. As he dried himself, he discovered little wanderings in the air, felt on his sides soft touches and caresses that were peculiarly delicious: sometimes they startled him, and he laughed as if he were not alone. The flowers, the meadow-sweet particularly, haunted him. He reached to put his hand over their fleeciness. They touched his thighs. Laughing, he gathered them and dusted himself all over with their cream dust and fragrance. For a moment he hesitated in wonder at himself: but the subtle glow in the hoary and black night reassured him. Things never had looked so personal and full of beauty, he had never known the wonder in himself before.

At nine o’clock he was waiting under the elder-bush, in a state of high trepidation, but feeling that he was worthy, having a sense of his own wonder. She was late. At a quarter-past nine she came, flitting swiftly, in her own eager way.

“No, she would NOT go to sleep,” said Paula, with a world of wrath in her tone. He laughed bashfully. They wandered out into the dim, hillside field.

“I have sat—in that bedroom—for an hour, for hours,” she cried indignantly. She took a deep breath: “Ah, breathe!” she smiled.

She was very intense, and full of energy.

“I want”—she was clumsy with the language—“I want—I should laike—to run—there!” She pointed across the field.

“Let’s run, then,” he said, curiously.

“Yes!”

And in an instant she was gone. He raced after her. For all he was so young and limber, he had difficulty in catching her. At first he could scarcely see her, though he could hear the rustle of her dress. She sped with astonishing fleetness. He overtook her, caught her by the arm, and they stood panting, facing one another with laughter.

“I could win,” she asserted blithely.

“Tha couldna,” he replied, with a peculiar, excited laugh. They walked on, rather breathless. In front of them suddenly appeared the dark shapes of the three feeding horses.

“We ride a horse?” she said.

“What, bareback?” he asked.

“You say?” She did not understand.

“With no saddle?”

“No saddle—yes—no saddle.”

“Coop, lass!” he said to the mare, and in a minute he had her by the forelock, and was leading her down to the stacks, where he put a halter on her. She was a big, strong mare. Maurice seated the Fr?ulein, clambered himself in front of the girl, using the wheel of the wagon as a mount, and together they trotted uphill, she holding lightly round his waist. From the crest of the hill they looked round.

The sky was darkening with an awning of cloud. On the left the hill rose black and wooded, made cosy by a few lights from cottages along the highway. The hill spread to the right, and tufts of trees shut round. But in front was a great vista of night, a sprinkle of cottage candles, a twinkling cluster of lights, like an elfish fair in full swing, at the colliery, an encampment of light at a village, a red flare on the sky far off, above an iron-foundry, and in the farthest distance the dim breathing of town lights. As they watched the night stretch far out, her arms tightened round his waist, and he pressed his elbows to his side, pressing her arms closer still. The horse moved restlessly. They clung to each other.

“Tha doesna want to go right away?” he asked the girl behind him.

“I stay with you,” she answered softly, and he felt her crouching close against him. He laughed curiously. He was afraid to kiss her, though he was urged to do so. They remained still, on the restless horse, watching the small lights lead deep into the night, an infinite distance.

“I don’t want to go,” he said, in a tone half pleading.

She did not answer. The horse stirred restlessly.

“Let him run,” cried Paula, “fast!”

She broke the spell, startled him into a little fury. He kicked the mare, hit her, and away she plunged downhill. The girl clung tightly to the young man. They were riding bareback down a rough, steep hill. Maurice clung hard with hands and knees. Paula held him fast round the waist, leaning her head on his shoulders, and thrilling with excitement.

“We shall be off, we shall be off,” he cried, laughing with excitement; but she only crouched behind and pressed tight to him. The mare tore across the field. Maurice expected every moment to be flung on to the grass. He gripped with all the strength of his knees. Paula tucked herself behind him, and often wrenched him almost from his hold. Man and girl were taut with effort.

At last the mare came to a standstill, blowing. Paula slid off, and in an instant Maurice was beside her. They were both highly excited. Before he knew what he was doing, he had her in his arms, fast, and was kissing her, and laughing. They did not move for some time. Then, in silence, they walked towards the stacks.

It had grown quite dark, the night was thick with cloud. He walked with his arm round Paula’s waist, she with her arm round him. They were near the stacks when Maurice felt a spot of rain.

“It’s going to rain,” he said.

“Rain!” she echoed, as if it were trivial.

“I s’ll have to put the stack-cloth on,” he said gravely. She did not understand.

When they got to the stacks, he went round to the shed, to return staggering in the darkness under the burden of the immense and heavy cloth. It had not been used once during the hay harvest.

“What are you going to do?” asked Paula, coming close to him in the darkness.

“Cover the top of the stack with it,” he replied. “Put it over the stack, to keep the rain out.”

“Ah!” she cried, “up there!” He dropped his burden. “Yes,” he answered.

Fumblingly he reared the long ladder up the side of the stack. He could not see the top.

“I hope it’s solid,” he said, softly.

A few smart drops of rain sounded drumming on the cloth. They seemed like another presence. It was very dark indeed between the great buildings of hay. She looked up the black wall, and shrank to him.

“You carry it up there?” she asked.

“Yes,” he answered.

“I help you?” she said.

And she did. They opened the cloth. He clambered first up the steep ladder, bearing the upper part, she followed closely, carrying her full share. They mounted the shaky ladder in silence, stealthily.

四

正在他们忙活的时候，杰弗里来帮弟弟盖苫布了。他轻轻地把自行车停在棚子前，却发现里面没有人。杰弗里来到干草垛那里，却听到了莫里斯和波拉两人的声音，莫里斯指挥波拉操作，同时还叮嘱她要小心，波拉则俏皮地学舌，两人慌忙之中还把梯子撞倒了。杰弗里听见他们如此甜蜜，悻悻地走开了。

杰弗里回到棚子里，扫视了一圈，便吹灭了车灯，打算回到干草垛那里把梯子帮他们扶起来。此时，一个身影弯腰走进了棚子。杰弗里紧张的心提到了嗓子眼儿，跳起来就把那个身影抓住了。奇怪的是，那人没有反抗，只听见一个女人绝望地哭泣着。杰弗里想起来了，是中午那个流浪汉的妻子，现在来寻她丈夫来了。

那个女人全身湿透，瑟瑟发抖，很可怜。她那流浪汉丈夫似乎已经把她抛弃了，她等了一天都没有见到她丈夫，便出来寻他。杰弗里见她冷得发抖，就划火柴给她取暖，不一会儿火柴就全用完了。杰弗里又听说她一天粒米未进，现在还饿着肚子呢，便给她拿了黄油面包吃。之后，杰弗里建议她最好把湿衣服脱下来，裹上毯子，这样身子才会暖和一些。为了避免尴尬，杰弗里说完就走出棚子回避。女人见他出去了，便吹灭灯脱了衣服。

收拾好后，杰弗里再次进来了。他又点亮了灯，仔细端详着这个女子，她娇小的身躯蜷缩着，脸上露出了一丝笑容。于是他和她聊了起来。她今年二十三岁，命苦遇到了这样一个丈夫，孩子早已夭折，她对人生感到绝望。他问她为什么不离开她的丈夫，听她的回答似乎带着一丝报复的口气。

她的脚冷得厉害，于是杰弗里便提出帮她暖脚。杰弗里十分心疼地把她那双像冰一样冷的脚，放在自己温暖厚实的大手上。她被感动了，伸手摸了摸他的头发，眼泪流了下来。她把杰弗里的头搂进自己怀里，痛苦地哭泣着。杰弗里惊呆了，等她终于松开手，他一把将她搂进怀里，紧紧地抱住她，温暖着她，他们相拥接吻，体验着美妙爱情的滋味。

Ⅳ

s they climbed the stacks a light stopped at the gate on the high road. It was Geoffrey, come to help his brother with the cloth. Afraid of his own intrusion, he wheeled his bicycle silently towards the shed. This was a corrugated iron erection, on the opposite side of the hedge from the stacks. Geoffrey let his light go in front of him, but there was no sign from the lovers. He thought he saw a shadow slinking away. The light of the bicycle lamp sheered yellowly across the dark, catching a glint of raindrops, a mist of darkness, shadow of leaves and strokes of long grass. Geoffrey entered the shed—no one was there. He walked slowly and doggedly round to the stacks. He had passed the wagon, when he heard something sheering down upon him. Starting back under the wall of hay, he saw the long ladder slither across the side of the stack, and fall with a bruising ring.

“What wor that?” he heard Maurice, aloft, ask cautiously.

“Something fall,” came the curious, almost pleased voice of the Fr?ulein.

“It wor niver th’ ladder,” said Maurice. He peered over the side of the stack. He lay down, looking.

“It is an’ a’!” he exclaimed. “We knocked it down with the cloth, dragging it over.”

“We fast up here?” she exclaimed with a thrill.

“We are that—without I shout and make ’em hear at the Vicarage.”

“Oh no,” she said quickly.

“I don’t want to,” he replied, with a short laugh. There came a swift clatter of raindrops on the cloth. Geoffrey crouched under the wall of the other stack.

“Mind where you tread—here, let me straighten this end,” said Maurice, with a peculiar intimate tone—a command and an embrace. “We s’ll have to sit under it. At any rate, we shan’t get wet.”

“Not get wet!” echoed the girl, pleased, but agitated.

Geoffrey heard the slide and rustle of the cloth over the top of the stack, heard Maurice telling her to “Mind!”

“Mind!” she repeated. “Mind! you say ‘Mind!’”

“Well, what if I do?” he laughed. “I don’t want you to fall over th’ side, do I?” His tone was masterful, but he was not quite sure of himself.

There was silence a moment or two.

“Maurice!” she said, plaintively.

“I’m here,” he answered, tenderly, his voice shaky with excitement that was near to distress. “There, I’ve done. Now should we— we’ll sit under this corner.”

“Maurice!” she was rather pitiful.

“What? You’ll be all right,” he remonstrated, tenderly indignant.

“I be all right,” she repeated, “I be all ra?ght, Maurice?”

“Tha knows tha will—I canna ca’ thee Powla. Should I ca’ thee Minnie?”

It was the name of a dead sister.

“Minnie?” she exclaimed in surprise.

“Aye, should I?”

She answered in full-throated German. He laughed shakily.

“Come on—come on under. But do yer wish you was safe in th’ Vicarage? Should I shout for somebody?” he asked.

“I don’t wish, no!” She was vehement.

“Art sure?” he insisted, almost indignantly.

“Sure—I quite sure.” She laughed.

Geoffrey turned away at the last words. Then the rain beat heavily. The lonely brother slouched miserably to the hut, where the rain played a mad tattoo. He felt very miserable, and jealous of Maurice.

His bicycle lamp, downcast, shone a yellow light on the stark floor of the shed or hut with one wall open. It lit up the trodden earth, the shafts of tools lying piled under the beam, beside the dreary grey metal of the building. He took off the lamp, shone it round the hut. There were piles of harness, tools, a big sugar box, a deep bed of hay—then the beams across the corrugated iron, all very dreary and stark. He shone the lamp into the night: nothing but the furtive glitter of raindrops through the mist of darkness, and black shapes hovering round.

Geoffrey blew out the light and flung himself on to the hay. He would put the ladder up for them in a while, when they would be wanting it. Meanwhile he sat and gloated over Maurice’s felicity. He was imaginative, and now he had something concrete to work upon. Nothing in the whole of life stirred him so profoundly, and so utterly, as the thought of this woman. For Paula was strange, foreign, different from the ordinary girls: the rousing, feminine quality seemed in her concentrated, brighter, more fascinating than in anyone he had known, so that he felt most like a moth near a candle. He would have loved her wildly—but Maurice had got her. His thoughts beat the same course, round and round. What was it like when you kissed her, when she held you tight round the waist, how did she feel towards Maurice, did she love to touch him, was he fine and attractive to her; what did she think of himself—she merely disregarded him, as she would disregard a horse in a field; why should she do so, why couldn’t he make her regard himself, instead of Maurice: he would never command a woman’s regard like that, he always gave in to her too soon; if only some woman would come and take him for what he was worth, though he was such a stumbler and showed to such disadvantage, ah, what a grand thing it would be; how he would kiss her. Then round he went again in the same course, brooding almost like a madman. Meanwhile the rain drummed deep on the shed, then grew lighter and softer. There came the drip, drip of the drops falling outside.

Geoffrey’s heart leaped up his chest, and he clenched himself, as a black shape crept round the post of the shed and, bowing, entered silently. The young man’s heart beat so heavily in plunges, he could not get his breath to speak. It was shock, rather than fear. The form felt towards him. He sprang up, gripped it with his great hands, panting “Now, then!”

There was no resistance, only a little whimper of despair.

“Let me go,” said a woman’s voice.

“What are you after?” he asked, in deep, gruff tones.

“I thought ‘e was ’ere,” she wept despairingly, with little, stubborn sobs.

“An’ you’ve found what you didn’t expect, have you?”

At the sound of his bullying she tried to get away from him.

“Let me go,” she said.

“Who did you expect to find here?” he asked, but more his natural self.

“I expected my husband—him as you saw at dinner. Let me go.”

“Why, is it you?” exclaimed Geoffrey. “Has he left you?”

“Let me go,” said the woman sullenly, trying to draw away. He realized that her sleeve was very wet, her arm slender under his grasp. Suddenly he grew ashamed of himself: he had no doubt hurt her, gripping her so hard. He relaxed, but did not let her go.

“An’ are you searching round after that snipe as was here at dinner?” he asked. She did not answer.

“Where did he leave you?”

“I left him—here. I’ve seen nothing of him since.”

“I s’d think it’s good riddance,” he said. She did not answer. He gave a short laugh, saying:

“I should ha’ thought you wouldn’t ha’ wanted to clap eyes on him again.”

“He’s my husband—an’ he’s not goin’ to run off if I can stop him.”

Geoffrey was silent, not knowing what to say.

“Have you got a jacket on?” he asked at last.

“What do you think? You’ve got hold of it.”

“You’re wet through, aren’t you?”

“I shouldn’t be dry, comin’ through that teemin’ rain. But ‘e’s not here, so I’ll go.”

“I mean,” he said humbly, “are you wet through?”

She did not answer. He felt her shiver.

“Are you cold?” he asked, in surprise and concern.

She did not answer. He did not know what to say.

“Stop a minute,” he said, and he fumbled in his pocket for his matches. He struck a light, holding it in the hollow of his large, hard palm. He was a big man, and he looked anxious. Shedding the light on her, he saw she was rather pale, and very weary looking. Her old sailor hat was sodden and drooping with rain. She wore a fawn-coloured jacket of smooth cloth. This jacket was black-wet where the rain had beaten, her skirt hung sodden, and dripped on to her boots. The match went out.

“Why, you’re wet through!” he said.

She did not answer.

“Shall you stop in here while it gives over?” he asked. She did not answer.

“‘Cause if you will, you’d better take your things off, an’ have th’ rug. There’s a horse-rug in the box.”

He waited, but she would not answer. So he lit his bicycle lamp, and rummaged in the box, pulling out a large brown blanket, striped with scarlet and yellow. She stood stock still. He shone the light on her. She was very pale, and trembling fitfully.

“Are you that cold?” he asked in concern. “Take your jacket off, and your hat, and put this right over you.”

Mechanically, she undid the enormous fawn-coloured buttons, and unpinned her hat. With her black hair drawn back from her low, honest brow, she looked little more than a girl, like a girl driven hard with womanhood by stress of life. She was small, and natty, with neat little features. But she shivered convulsively.

“Is something a-matter with you?” he asked.

“I’ve walked to Bulwell and back,” she quivered, “looking for him— an’ I’ve not touched a thing since this morning.” She did not weep—she was too dreary-hardened to cry. He looked at her in dismay, his mouth half open: “Gormin”, as Maurice would have said.

“‘Aven’t you had nothing to eat?” he said.

Then he turned aside to the box. There, the bread remaining was kept, and the great piece of cheese, and such things as sugar and salt, with all table utensils: there was some butter.

She sat down drearily on the bed of hay. He cut her a piece of bread and butter, and a piece of cheese. This she took, but ate listlessly.

“I want a drink,” she said.

“We ‘aven’t got no beer,” he answered. “My father doesn’t have it.”

“I want water,” she said.

He took a can and plunged through the wet darkness, under the great black hedge, down to the trough. As he came back he saw her in the half-lit little cave sitting bunched together. The soaked grass wet his feet—he thought of her. When he gave her a cup of water, her hand touched his and he felt her fingers hot and glossy. She trembled so she spilled the water.

“Do you feel badly?” he asked.

“I can’t keep myself still—but it’s only with being tired and having nothing to eat.”

He scratched his head contemplatively, waited while she ate her piece of bread and butter. Then he offered her another piece.

“I don’t want it just now,” she said.

“You’ll have to eat summat,” he said.

“I couldn’t eat any more just now.”

He put the piece down undecidedly on the box. Then there was another long pause. He stood up with bent head. The bicycle, like a restful animal, glittered behind him, turning towards the wall. The woman sat hunched on the hay, shivering.

“Can’t you get warm?” he asked.

“I shall by an’ by—don’t you bother. I’m taking your seat—are you stopping here all night?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll be goin’ in a bit,” she said.

“Nay, I non want you to go. I’m thinkin’ how you could get warm.”

“Don’t you bother about me,” she remonstrated, almost irritably.

“I just want to see as the stacks is all right. You take your shoes an’ stockin’s an’ all your wet things off: you can easy wrap yourself all over in that rug, there’s not so much of you.”

“It’s raining—I s’ll be all right—I s’ll be going in a minute.”

“I’ve got to see as the stacks is safe. Take your wet things off.”

“Are you coming back?” she asked.

“I mightn’t, not till morning.”

“Well, I s’ll be gone in ten minutes, then. I’ve no rights to be here, an’ I s’ll not let anybody be turned out for me.”

“You won’t be turning me out.”

“Whether or no, I shan’t stop.”

“Well, shall you if I come back?” he asked. She did not answer.

He went. In a few moments, she blew the light out. The rain was falling steadily, and the night was a black gulf. All was intensely still. Geoffrey listened everywhere: no sound save the rain. He stood between the stacks, but only heard the trickle of water, and the light swish of rain. Everything was lost in blackness. He imagined death was like that, many things dissolved in silence and darkness, blotted out, but existing. In the dense blackness he felt himself almost extinguished. He was afraid he might not find things the same. Almost frantically, he stumbled, feeling his way, till his hand touched the wet metal. He had been looking for a gleam of light.

“Did you blow the lamp out?” he asked, fearful lest the silence should answer him.

“Yes,” she answered humbly. He was glad to hear her voice. Groping into the pitch-dark shed, he knocked against the box, part of whose cover served as table. There was a clatter and a fall.

“That’s the lamp, an’ the knife, an’ the cup,” he said. He struck a match.

“Th’ cup’s not broke.” He put it into the box.

“But th’ oil’s spilled out o’ th’ lamp. It always was a rotten old thing.” He hastily blew out his match, which was burning his fingers. Then he struck another light.

“You don’t want a lamp, you know you don’t, and I s’ll be going directly, so you come an’ lie down an’ get your night’s rest. I’m not taking any of your place.”

He looked at her by the light of another match. She was a queer little bundle, all brown, with gaudy border folding in and out, and her little face peering at him. As the match went out she saw him beginning to smile.

“I can sit right at this end,” she said. “You lie down.”

He came and sat on the hay, at some distance from her. After a spell of silence:

“Is he really your husband?” he asked.

“He is!” she answered grimly.

“Hm!” Then there was silence again.

After a while: “Are you warm now?”

“Why do you bother yourself?”

“I don’t bother myself—do you follow him because you like him?” He put it very timidly. He wanted to know.

“I don’t—I wish he was dead,” this with bitter contempt. Then doggedly; “But he’s my husband.”

He gave a short laugh.

“By Gad!” he said.

Again, after a while: “Have you been married long?”

“Four years.”

“Four years—why, how old are you?”

“Twenty-three.”

“Are you turned twenty-three?”

“Last May.”

“Then you’re four month older than me.” He mused over it. They were only two voices in the pitch-black night. It was eerie silence again.

“And do you just tramp about?” he asked.

“He reckons he’s looking for a job. But he doesn’t like work in any shape or form. He was a stableman when I married him, at Greenhalgh’s, the horse-dealers, at Chesterfield, where I was housemaid. He left that job when the baby was only two month, and I’ve been badgered about from pillar to post ever sin’. They say a rolling stone gathers no moss . . .”

“An’ where’s the baby?”

“It died when it was ten month old.”

Now the silence was clinched between them. It was quite a long time before Geoffrey ventured to say sympathetically: “You haven’t much to look forward to.”

“I’ve wished many a score time when I’ve started shiverin’ an’ shakin’ at nights, as I was taken bad for death. But we’re not that handy at dying.”

He was silent. “But what ever shall you do?” he faltered.

“I s’ll find him, if I drop by th’ road.”

“Why?” he asked, wondering, looking her way, though he saw nothing but solid darkness.

“Because I shall. He’s not going to have it all his own road.”

“But why don’t you leave him?”

“Because he’s not goin’ to have it all his own road.”

She sounded very determined, even vindictive. He sat in wonder, feeling uneasy, and vaguely miserable on her behalf. She sat extraordinarily still. She seemed like a voice only, a presence.

“Are you warm now?” he asked, half afraid.

“A bit warmer—but my feet!” She sounded pitiful.

“Let me warm them with my hands,” he asked her. “I’m hot enough.”

“No, thank you,” she said, coldly.

Then, in the darkness, she felt she had wounded him. He was writhing under her rebuff, for his offer had been pure kindness.

“They’re ‘appen dirty,” she said, half mocking.

“Well—mine is—an’ I have a bath a’most every day,” he answered.

“I don’t know when they’ll get warm,” she moaned to herself.

“Well, then, put them in my hands.”

She heard him faintly rattling the match-box, and then a phosphorescent glare began to fume in his direction. Presently he was holding two smoking, blue-green blotches of light towards her feet. She was afraid. But her feet ached so, and the impulse drove her on, so she placed her soles lightly on the two blotches of smoke. His large hands clasped over her instep, warm and hard.

“They’re like ice!” he said, in deep concern.

He warmed her feet as best he could, putting them close against him. Now and again convulsive tremors ran over her. She felt his warm breath on the balls of her toes, that were bunched up in his hands. Leaning forward, she touched his hair delicately with her fingers. He thrilled. She fell to gently stroking his hair, with timid, pleading finger-tips.

“Do they feel any better?” he asked, in a low voice, suddenly lifting his face to her. This sent her hand sliding softly over his face, and her finger-tips caught on his mouth. She drew quickly away. He put his hand out to find hers, in his other palm holding both her feet. His wandering hand met her face. He touched it curiously. It was wet. He put his big fingers cautiously on her eyes, into two little pools of tears.

“What’s a matter?” he asked, in a low, choked voice.

She leaned down to him, and gripped him tightly round the neck, pressing him to her bosom in a little frenzy of pain. Her bitter disillusionment with life, her unalleviated shame and degradation during the last four years, had driven her into loneliness, and hardened her till a large part of her nature was caked and sterile. Now she softened again, and her spring might be beautiful. She had been in a fair way to make an ugly old woman.

She clasped the head of Geoffrey to her breast, which heaved and fell, and heaved again. He was bewildered, full of wonder. He allowed the woman to do as she would with him. Her tears fell on his hair, as she wept noiselessly; and he breathed deep as she did. At last she let go her clasp. He put his arms round her.

“Come and let me warm you,” he said, folding her up on his knee, and lapping her with his heavy arms against himself. She was small and c?line. He held her very warm and close. Presently she stole her arms round him.

“You ARE big,” she whispered.

He gripped her hard, started, put his mouth down wanderingly, seeking her out. His lips met her temple. She slowly, deliberately turned her mouth to his, and with opened lips, met him in a kiss, his first love kiss.

五

第二天一早，杰弗里在一个寒冷的黎明中醒来，看见自己臂弯里躺着的那个女人。自己是如此需要这么一个人，她的存在让他觉得心中就像有了主心骨一样，她的娇小更令他的心中充满柔情。杰弗里已疯狂地爱上了她。

她醒来了，此时他才得知她名叫利迪娅。他央求她不要再去找寻她的丈夫，并要求她跟自己结婚，但是她却不置可否。后来她提到她有个出嫁的姐姐，于是杰弗里就叫她去她姐姐的农庄找活干，等时机成熟了，就跟他一起去加拿大。利迪娅同意了，但她不时表现出的那种对他的不信任令他垂头丧气。

杰弗里溜达到坡上去看弟弟和那位波拉姑娘现在怎么样了。他悄悄把梯子给他们扶起来后，便走开了。没走几步，就听到他们在吵架，波拉埋怨莫里斯对她撒谎，说梯子掉下去了，但是明明在这儿，说她再也不信任他了，还说他下作。莫里斯爬下来以后，等了半天，波拉都赌气不愿下去，他便独自走开了。刚好和哥哥碰上，他还很吃惊。杰弗里便向他说了留宿那个流浪汉的妻子的事情。他们一起来到了棚子。利迪娅已经梳妆好了，看上去清秀可人，正在叠被子。杰弗里第一次有了底气，指使莫里斯去外面捡柴禾。莫里斯顺从地出去了。不一会儿，波拉过来了，头发上粘着几根草，甚是狼狈。四人便围坐在火堆前，吃咸肉、喝咖啡。

后来，波拉和莫里斯订了婚，杰弗里则和利迪娅在一起了。

Ⅴ

t was breaking cold dawn when Geoffrey woke. The woman was still sleeping in his arms. Her face in sleep moved all his tenderness: the tight shutting of her mouth, as if in resolution to bear what was very hard to bear, contrasted so pitifully with the small mould of her features. Geoffrey pressed her to his bosom: having her, he felt he could bruise the lips of the scornful, and pass on erect, unabateable. With her to complete him, to form the core of him, he was firm and whole. Needing her so much, he loved her fervently.

Meanwhile the dawn came like death, one of those slow, livid mornings that seem to come in a cold sweat. Slowly, and painfully, the air began to whiten. Geoffrey saw it was not raining. As he was watching the ghastly transformation outside, he felt aware of something. He glanced down: she was open-eyed, watching him; she had golden-brown, calm eyes, that immediately smiled into his. He also smiled, bowed softly down and kissed her. They did not speak for some time. Then:

“What’s thy name?” he asked curiously.

“Lydia,” she said.

“Lydia!” he repeated, wonderingly. He felt rather shy.

“Mine’s Geoffrey Wookey,” he said.

She merely smiled at him.

They were silent for a considerable time. By morning light, things look small. The huge trees of the evening were dwindling to hoary, small, uncertain things, trespassing in the sick pallor of the atmosphere.

There was a dense mist, so that the light could scarcely breathe. Everything seemed to quiver with cold and sickliness.

“Have you often slept out?” he asked her.

“Not so very,” she answered.

“You won’t go after HIM?” he asked.

“I s’ll have to,” she replied, but she nestled in to Geoffrey. He felt a sudden panic.

“You musn’t,” he exclaimed, and she saw he was afraid for himself. She let it be, was silent.

“We couldn’t get married?” he asked, thoughtfully.

“No.”

He brooded deeply over this. At length:

“Would you go to Canada with me?”

“We’ll see what you think in two months’ time,” she replied quietly, without bitterness.

“I s’ll think the same,” he protested, hurt.

She did not answer, only watched him steadily. She was there for him to do as he liked with; but she would not injure his fortunes; no, not to save his soul.

“Haven’t you got no relations?” he asked.

“A married sister at Crick.”

“On a farm?”

“No—married a farm labourer—but she’s very comfortable. I’ll go there, if you want me to, just till I can get another place in service.”

He considered this.

“Could you get on a farm?” he asked wistfully.

“Greenhalgh’s was a farm.”

He saw the future brighten: she would be a help to him. She agreed to go to her sister, and to get a place of service—until Spring, he said, when they would sail for Canada. He waited for her assent.

“You will come with me, then?” he asked.

“When the time comes,” she said.

Her want of faith made him bow his head: she had reason for it.

“Shall you walk to Crick, or go from Langley Mill to Ambergate? But it’s only ten mile to walk. So we can go together up Hunt’s Hill—you’d have to go past our lane-end, then I could easy nip down an’ fetch you some money,” he said, humbly.

“I’ve got half a sovereign by me—it’s more than I s’ll want.”

“Let’s see it,” he said.

After a while, fumbling under the blanket, she brought out the piece of money. He felt she was independent of him. Brooding rather bitterly, he told himself she’d forsake him. His anger gave him courage to ask:

“Shall you go in service in your maiden name?”

“No.”

He was bitterly wrathful with her—full of resentment.

“I bet I s’ll niver see you again,” he said, with a short, hard laugh. She put her arms round him, pressed him to her bosom, while the tears rose to her eyes. He was reassured, but not satisfied.

“Shall you write to me to-night?”

“Yes, I will.”

“And can I write to you—who shall I write to?”

“Mrs Bredon.”

“‘Bredon’!” he repeated bitterly.

He was exceedingly uneasy.

The dawn had grown quite wan. He saw the hedges drooping wet down the grey mist. Then he told her about Maurice.

“Oh, you shouldn’t!” she said. “You should ha’ put the ladder up for them, you should.”

“Well—I don’t care.”

“Go and do it now—and I’ll go.”

“No, don’t you. Stop an’ see our Maurice, go on, stop an’ see him—then I s’ll be able to tell him.”

She consented in silence. He had her promise she would not go before he returned. She adjusted her dress, found her way to the trough, where she performed her toilet.

Geoffrey wandered round to the upper field. The stacks looked wet in the mist, the hedge was drenched. Mist rose like steam from the grass, and the near hills were veiled almost to a shadow. In the valley, some peaks of black poplar showed fairly definite, jutting up. He shivered with chill.

There was no sound from the stacks, and he could see nothing. After all, he wondered, were they up there. But he reared the ladder to the place whence it had been swept, then went down the hedge to gather dry sticks. He was breaking off thin dead twigs under a holly tree when he heard, on the perfectly still air: “Well I’m dashed!”

He listened intently. Maurice was awake.

“Sithee here!” the lad’s voice exclaimed. Then, after a while, the foreign sound of the girl:

“What—oh, thair!”

“Aye, th’ ladder’s there, right enough.”

“You said it had fall down.”

“Well, I heard it drop—an’ I couldna feel it nor see it.”

“You said it had fall down—you lie, you liar.”

“Nay, as true as I’m here—”

“You tell me lies—make me stay here—you tell me lies—” She was passionately indignant.

“As true as I’m standing here—” he began.

“Lies!—lies!—lies!” she cried. “I don’t believe you, never. You MEAN, you mean, mean, mean!”

“A’ ra?ght, then!” he was now incensed, in his turn.

“You are bad, mean, mean, mean.”

“Are yer commin’ down?” asked Maurice, coldly.

“No—I will not come with you—mean, to tell me lies.”

“Are ter commin’ down?”

“No, I don’t want you.”

“A’ ra?ght, then!”

Geoffrey, peering through the holly tree, saw Maurice negotiating the ladder. The top rung was below the brim of the stack, and rested on the cloth, so it was dangerous to approach. The Fr?ulein watched him from the end of the stack, where the cloth thrown back showed the light, dry hay. He slipped slightly, she screamed. When he had got on to the ladder, he pulled the cloth away, throwing it back, making it easy for her to descend.

“Now are ter comin’?” he asked.

“No!” she shook her head violently, in a pet.

Geoffrey felt slightly contemptuous of her. But Maurice waited.

“Are ter comin’?” he called again.

“No,” she flashed, like a wild cat.

“All right, then I’m going.”

He descended. At the bottom, he stood holding the ladder.

“Come on, while I hold it steady,” he said.

There was no reply. For some minutes he stood patiently with his foot on the bottom rung of the ladder. He was pale, rather washed-out in his appearance, and he drew himself together with cold.

“Are ter commin’, or aren’t ter?” he asked at length. Still there was no reply.

“Then stop up till tha’rt ready,” he muttered, and he went away. Round the other side of the stacks he met Geoffrey.

“What, are tha?gh here?” he exclaimed.

“Bin here a’ na?ght,” replied Geoffrey. “I come to help thee wi’ th’ cloth, but I found it on, an’ th’ ladder down, so I thowt tha’d gone.”

“Did ter put th’ ladder up?”

“I did a bit sin.”

Maurice brooded over this, Geoffrey struggled with himself to get out his own news. At last he blurted:

“Tha knows that woman as wor here yis’day dinner—‘er come back, an’ stopped i’ th’ shed a’ night, out o’ th’ rain.”

“Oh—ah!” said Maurice, his eye kindling, and a smile crossing his pallor.

“An’ I s’ll gi’e her some breakfast.”

“Oh—ah!” repeated Maurice.

“It’s th’ man as is good-for-nowt, not her,” protested Geoffrey. Maurice did not feel in a position to cast stones.

“Tha pleases thysen,” he said, “what ter does.” He was very quiet, unlike himself. He seemed bothered and anxious, as Geoffrey had not seen him before.

“What’s up wi’ thee?” asked the elder brother, who in his own heart was glad, and relieved.

“Nowt,” was the reply.

They went together to the hut. The woman was folding the blanket. She was fresh from washing, and looked very pretty. Her hair, instead of being screwed tightly back, was coiled in a knot low down, partly covering her ears. Before, she had deliberately made herself plain-looking: now she was neat and pretty, with a sweet, womanly gravity.

“Hello. I didn’t think to find you here,” said Maurice, very awkwardly, smiling. She watched him gravely without reply. “But it was better in shelter than outside, last night,” he added.

“Yes,” she replied.

“Shall you get a few more sticks?” Geoffrey asked him. It was a new thing for Geoffrey to be leader. Maurice obeyed. He wandered forth into the damp, raw morning. He did not go to the stack, as he shrank from meeting Paula.

At the mouth of the hut, Geoffrey was making the fire. The woman got out coffee from the box: Geoffrey set the tin to boil. They were arranging breakfast when Paula appeared. She was hatless. Bits of hay stuck in her hair, and she was white-faced—altogether, she did not show to advantage.

“Ah—you!” she exclaimed, seeing Geoffrey.

“Hello!” he answered. “You’re out early.”

“Where’s Maurice?”

“I dunno, he should be back directly.”

Paula was silent.

“When have you come?” she asked.

“I come last night, but I could see nobody about. I got up half an hour sin’, an’ put th’ ladder up ready to take the stack-cloth up.”

Paula understood, and was silent. When Maurice returned with the faggots, she was crouched warming her hands. She looked up at him, but he kept his eyes averted from her. Geoffrey met the eyes of Lydia, and smiled. Maurice put his hands to the fire.

“You cold?” asked Paula tenderly.

“A bit,” he answered, quite friendly, but reserved. And all the while the four sat round the fire, drinking their smoked coffee, eating each a small piece of toasted bacon, Paula watched eagerly for the eyes of Maurice, and he avoided her. He was gentle, but would not give his eyes to her looks. And Geoffrey smiled constantly to Lydia, who watched gravely.

The German girl succeeded in getting safely into the Vicarage, her escapade unknown to anyone save the housemaid. Before a week was out, she was openly engaged to Maurice, and when her month’s notice expired, she went to live at the farm.

Geoffrey and Lydia kept faith one with the other.公主

The Princess

科林·厄克特是一个英俊的男子，很有魅力。他是一个富有的绅士，多年来出没于上流社会的各种集会，漫无目的地闯荡着。终于，他在不惑之年娶了富家小姐汉娜·普莱斯考特为妻。厄克特太太生下女儿之后两年便去世了。

汉娜的家人对不切实际的、像幻影一样四处游逛的科林·厄克特先生非常不满意，认为他是个自私的家伙，更不适合做孩子的监护人；汉娜去世后，他们便催促厄克特把孩子过继给他们。但是厄克特怎么会答应，他爱他的女儿还来不及呢！他总是称女儿为“我的公主”，对于妻子在波士顿的那些亲戚，他一概不予理睬。

女儿在父亲的照料下一天天长大，人们叫她厄克特公主。她也像真正的公主一样，在父亲的教导下，逐渐变成一个目空一切的、矜持的人，举止间仿佛自己真是皇亲贵戚一般。连管家都评价这孩子太少年老成了。她事事要求纯洁无瑕、尽善尽美，就像画中人一样保持着优雅的姿态。

她十九岁那年，外公死了，给她留下一笔可观的财产，条件是每年必须在美国居住半个月。因为父亲的境况日趋没落，为了好的生活，他们被迫接受了这个协议，在美国开始了新的生活。

光阴荏苒，转眼公主就要三十岁了。但她依然像个不食人间烟火的仙女，和父亲待在他们两个人的小圈子里，从不去想父亲死后她将要怎么办。

她三十八岁那年，父亲去世了。她找了个名叫康明斯的女伴和她一起生活，向女伴转移自己对父亲疯狂的怀恋。公主依然傲慢地面对一切。岁月流逝，但三十几岁的人看上去像是只有二十几岁。是的，她是公主，她用挑战的姿态面对着这个没有王子的世界。

父亲去世后，她觉得要做点什么了，她开始以一种求偶的目光观察男子，并不是因为她突然对男人产生了兴趣，而是觉得结婚是一件她必须履行的程序。于是，在她三十八岁生日之后，她和康明斯小姐去新墨西哥旅游去了。

八月底，她们来到塞洛库多农场。富人们常在那里度假，那里充满了形形色色的人物。她看上去顶多不过二十五岁，美艳绝伦。男人们对她产生了强烈的好奇，但大都被她蔑视。

唯一让公主产生兴趣的是一个名叫多明戈·罗梅罗的导游。他是个墨西哥人，体格健壮，精力充沛，脸色阴沉，眼神中闪烁着一种骄傲自信，令他在众多男人中显得卓越不凡。公主雇他做导游时发现了他的与众不同——那一次，他陪她去峡谷中垂钓。从那以后，她便总是来寻他，他们还和另外几位旅友一起露营过一次。他们之间逐渐生长出一种朦胧的亲密感。

有一次，公主提出想到深山里去看野生动物。罗梅罗知道森林里有一处小木屋，是当年挖金矿的人废弃掉的，但是去深山里比较危险，他怕她后悔，便试探她的决心。谁知，她那公主般的倔强劲头上来了，坚持要去。罗梅罗只好答应。

他需要事先进山去布置。回来以后，便接上公主和她的女伴康明斯小姐进山了。

三人排成一列，缓缓地骑马前行。罗梅罗在前头开路，公主紧跟其后，康明斯小姐不太精神地跟在后面。越往山上走就越冷越黑，他们已经爬得很高了，周围一片冰冷，康明斯的马受惊了，在原地打着转。跨过一堆岩石的时候，康明斯的马又受了伤，马腿鲜血直流。罗梅罗说不打紧，可以继续骑，但康明斯听说还要继续赶五个小时山路，忍不住惊叫了起来。她心疼她的马，便决定自己牵马回去。僵持了一会儿，公主终于同意了。于是罗梅罗叫康明斯骑自己的马，他牵着她的伤马送她回去。

公主便独自一人慢慢往山上走，她很生康明斯的气。走了一个多小时，她走到一条小溪边，便停下来生起一堆火，拿出午饭打算享受午餐。此时两个印第安人经过，其中一个她以前见过，他们向她打了招呼，问她为何独自一人，她说罗梅罗随后就到。这两人打猎归来，便坐下来同她一起烤火。他们显得很饿的样子，她便分给了他们一些食物。

不一会儿，罗梅罗回来了。他和大家打了招呼，在火堆边消磨了一个多小时的午后时光，便和公主骑上马继续赶路了。

又走了一个小时后，他们便开始走下坡路，这段路更加艰难。眼前莽莽的群山看上去野蛮而没有生气，公主没有想到深山里会是这样一副可怕的景象，她感到恐惧，甚至有点想回去了。避过凛冽的寒风，又下了几道陡坡，他们终于在傍晚到达了小木屋。但眼前颓败的场景不免令她失望：房顶早就没了，门也塌下来，屋内只有一张木床和几个当板凳用的木头墩子。

罗梅罗说干就干，他找来树干架上屋顶，又在屋内生了一堆火，然后又去马上卸货。公主只是机械地添着柴火，显得有些茫然。弄好了以后，罗梅罗又解开铺盖卷弄好床铺，让公主躺下先休息，自己架起锅准备晚饭。寒冷、陌生的环境使公主动作迟缓、木然。由于太冷，她叫罗梅罗把晚饭给她端到床上吃。晚餐后，罗梅罗把一切收拾停当，觉得没事可做，两人便打算睡觉。公主睡床，罗梅罗打地铺。

半夜里，公主被冻醒了。她冷得发抖，迫切地需要有人给她温暖。于是她管不了那么多了，叫醒了罗梅罗。罗梅罗会意，扑过去，把她搂在了怀里。她从来没有这么屈服过，但这次她决心要放任自流，于是两人便自然地发生了那事。

第二天黎明，公主醒来了，叫罗梅罗去生火。罗梅罗满脸的温柔蜜意，顺从地去生火。公主却看不惯他这种表情，她厌恶他，说想吃过早饭就下山去。罗梅罗脸上的温柔忽地不见了，阴沉着脸问她，难道她不喜欢昨晚那一夜。公主态度冰冷地说，她觉得无所谓，她并不怎么喜欢。罗梅罗觉得自己像是被玩弄了，他发起怒来，把公主的衣物和马鞍全部扔在门外的水塘里，然后抄起猎枪出门了。公主孤独地坐着，心里十分害怕。

下午，罗梅罗扛着一只鹿回来了。他叫她到太阳底下来，她缩回屋去表示抗议。他不顾她的反抗一把抓住她。她毫无力量，只得屈从于他，但她内心却冷酷而坚定，她对罗梅罗说他永远也别妄想征服得了她。罗梅罗生气地去剥鹿皮去了。他一面做晚饭一面说，除非她答应跟他下山去成婚，否则她就一直待在这儿别想走。但是公主毫不屈服，并且激怒了罗梅罗，他生气地对她发泄了一通欲望。公主十分痛苦，她好像被这个人把握住了一些什么似的，她多么想再一次独立，成为自己啊。

第二天，为了避免引人注意，罗梅罗没有生火。下午，公主蒙在被子里哭了很久。罗梅罗不理她，出门去了。晚上，屋子里奇冷，公主只得央求他生起火来。

第三天仍旧很冷，公主的意志已经脆弱到了极点，此时如果罗梅罗求她嫁给他，公主肯定会答应的。但他没有，倔犟的他再也没有说过。

第四天，公主正裹着毛毯在门口晒太阳，忽然看见两个骑马的人影。她觉得肯定是来找她的人，心中万分喜悦。罗梅罗则端着枪警惕地瞄准，开了两枪，打退了来人，然后摸到岩石后躲了起来。外面安静了一会儿，突然一阵枪响，罗梅罗被打死了。公主吓得一动不动。森林委员会的人出来了，高兴地喊着打中了。人们发现了她，她跟人们说罗梅罗疯了，人们便相信了她的话，把她送下了山。

下山以后，她也犯起神经来，装作自己什么都不记得的样子。后来事情的真相被掩盖起来，大家都道是她在山上遇到个疯子向她的马开枪，她受了惊吓。

后来她嫁给一个上了年纪的人，还很满意。

o her father, she was The Princess. To her Boston aunts and uncles she was just Dollie Urquhart, poor little thing.

Colin Urquhart was just a bit mad. He was of an old Scottish family, and he claimed royal blood. The blood of Scottish kings flowed in his veins. On this point, his American relatives said, he was just a bit “off”. They could not bear any more to be told which royal blood of Scotland blued his veins. The whole thing was rather ridiculous, and a sore point. The only fact they remembered was that it was not Stuart.

He was a handsome man, with a wide-open blue eye that seemed sometimes to be looking at nothing, soft black hair brushed rather low on his low, broad brow, and a very attractive body. Add to this a most beautiful speaking voice, usually rather hushed and diffident, but sometimes resonant and powerful like bronze, and you have the sum of his charms. He looked like some old Celtic hero. He looked as if he should have worn a greyish kilt and a sporran, and shown his knees. His voice came direct out of the hushed Ossianic past.

For the rest, he was one of those gentlemen of sufficient but not excessive means who fifty years ago wandered vaguely about, never arriving anywhere, never doing anything, and never definitely being anything, yet well received in the good society of more than one country.

He did not marry till he was nearly forty, and then it was a wealthy Miss Prescott, from New England. Hannah Prescott at twenty-two was fascinated by the man with the soft black hair not yet touched by grey, and the wide, rather vague blue eyes. Many women had been fascinated before her. But Colin Urquhart, by his very vagueness, had avoided any decisive connection.

Mrs. Urquhart lived three years in the mist and glamour of her husband’s presence. And then it broke her. It was like living with a fascinating spectre. About most things he was completely, even ghostly oblivious. He was always charming, courteous, perfectly gracious in that hushed, musical voice of his. But absent. When all came to all, he just wasn’t there. “Not all there,” as the vulgar say.

He was the father of the little girl she bore at the end of the first year. But this did not substantiate him the more. His very beauty and his haunting musical quality became dreadful to her after the first few months. The strange echo: he was like a living echo! His very flesh, when you touched it, did not seem quite the flesh of a real man.

Perhaps it was that he was a little bit mad. She thought it definitely the night her baby was born.

“Ah, so my little princess has come at last!” he said, in his throaty, singing Celtic voice, like a glad chant, swaying absorbed.

It was a tiny, frail baby, with wide, amazed blue eyes. They christened it Mary Henrietta. She called the little thing My Dollie. He called it always My Princess.

It was useless to fly at him. He just opened his wide blue eyes wider, and took a child-like, silent dignity there was no getting past.

Hannah Prescott had never been robust. She had no great desire to live. So when the baby was two years old she suddenly died.

The Prescotts felt a deep but unadmitted resentment against Colin Urquhart. They said he was selfish. Therefore they discontinued Hannah’s income, a month after her burial in Florence, after they had urged the father to give the child over to them, and he had courteously, musically, but quite finally refused. He treated the Prescotts as if they were not of his world, not realities to him: just casual phenomena, or gramophones, talking-machines that had to be answered. He answered them. But of their actual existence he was never once aware.

They debated having him certified unsuitable to be guardian of his own child. But that would have created a scandal. So they did the simplest thing, after all—washed their hands of him. But they wrote scrupulously to the child, and sent her modest presents of money at Christmas, and on the anniversary of the death of her mother.

To The Princess her Boston relatives were for many years just a nominal reality. She lived with her father, and he travelled continually, though in a modest way, living on his moderate income. And never going to America. The child changed nurses all the time. In Italy it was a contadina; in India she had an ayah; in Germany she had a yellow-haired peasant girl.

Father and child were inseparable. He was not a recluse. Wherever he went he was to be seen paying formal calls going out to luncheon or to tea, rarely to dinner. And always with the child. People called her Princess Urquhart, as if that were her christened name.

She was a quick, dainty little thing with dark gold hair that went a soft brown, and wide, slightly prominent blue eyes that were at once so candid and so knowing. She was always grown up; she never really grew up. Always strangely wise, and always childish.

It was her father’s fault.

“My little Princess must never take too much notice of people and the things they say and do,” he repeated to her. “People don’t know what they are doing and saying. They chatter-chatter, and they hurt one another, and they hurt themselves very often, till they cry. But don’t take any notice, my little Princess. Because it is all nothing. Inside everybody there is another creature, a demon which doesn’t care at all. You peel away all the things they say and do and feel, as cook peels away the outside of the onions. And in the middle of everybody there is a green demon which you can’t peel away. And this green demon never changes, and it doesn’t care at all about all the things that happen to the outside leaves of the person, all the chatter-chatter, and all the husbands and wives and children, and troubles and fusses. You peel everything away from people, and there is a green, upright demon in every man and woman; and this demon is a man’s real self, and a woman’s real self. It doesn’t really care about anybody, it belongs to the demons and the primitive fairies, who never care. But, even so, there are big demons and mean demons, and splendid demonish fairies, and vulgar ones. But there are no royal fairy women left. Only you, my little Princess. You are the last of the royal race of the old people; the last, my Princess. There are no others. You and I are the last. When I am dead there will be only you. And that is why, darling, you will never care for any of the people in the world very much. Because their demons are all dwindled and vulgar. They are not royal. Only you are royal, after me. Always remember that. And always remember, it is a great secret. If you tell people, they will try to kill you, because they will envy you for being a Princess. It is our great secret, darling. I am a prince, and you a princess, of the old, old blood. And we keep our secret between us, all alone. And so, darling, you must treat all people very politely, because noblesse oblige. But you must never forget that you alone are the last of Princesses, and that all other are less than you are, less noble, more vulgar. Treat them politely and gently and kindly, darling. But you are the Princess, and they are commoners. Never try to think of them as if they were like you. They are not. You will find, always, that they are lacking, lacking in the royal touch, which only you have—”

The Princess learned her lesson early—the first lesson, of absolute reticence, the impossibility of intimacy with any other than her father; the second lesson, of na?ve, slightly benevolent politeness. As a small child, something crystallised in her character, making her clear and finished, and as impervious as crystal.

“Dear child!” her hostesses said of her. “She is so quaint and old-fashioned; such a lady, poor little mite!”

She was erect, and very dainty. Always small, nearly tiny in physique, she seemed like a changeling beside her big, handsome, slightly mad father. She dressed very simply, usually in blue or delicate greys, with little collars of old Milan point, or very finely-worked linen. She had exquisite little hands, that made the piano sound like a spinet when she played. She was rather given to wearing cloaks and capes, instead of coats, out of doors, and little eighteenth-century sort of hats. Her complexion was pure apple-blossom.

She looked as if she had stepped out of a picture. But no one, to her dying day, ever knew exactly the strange picture her father had framed her in and from which she never stepped.

Her grandfather and grandmother and her Aunt Maud demanded twice to see her, once in Rome and once in Paris. Each time they were charmed, piqued, and annoyed. She was so exquisite and such a little virgin. At the same time so knowing and so oddly assured. That odd, assured touch of condescension, and the inward coldness, infuriated her American relations.

Only she really fascinated her grandfather. He was spellbound; in a way, in love with the little faultless thing. His wife would catch him brooding, musing over his grandchild, long months after the meeting, and craving to see her again. He cherished to the end the fond hope that she might come to live with him and her grandmother.

“Thank you so much, grandfather. You are so very kind. But Papa and I are such an old couple, you see, such a crochety old couple, living in a world of our own.”

Her father let her see the world—from the outside. And he let her read. When she was in her teens she read Zola and Maupassant, and with the eyes of Zola and Maupassant she looked on Paris. A little later she read Tolstoi and Dostoevsky. The latter confused her. The others, she seemed to understand with a very shrewd, canny understanding, just as she understood the Decameron stories as she read them in their old Italian, or the Nibelung poems. Strange and uncanny, she seemed to understand things in a cold light perfectly, with all the flush of fire absent. She was something like a changeling, not quite human.

This earned her, also, strange antipathies. Cabmen and railway porters, especially in Paris and Rome, would suddenly treat her with brutal rudeness, when she was alone. They seemed to look on her with sudden violent antipathy. They sensed in her curious impertinence, an easy, sterile impertinence towards the things they felt most. She was so assured, and her flower of maidenhood was so scentless. She could look at a lusty, sensual Roman cabman as if he were a sort of grotesque, to make her smile. She knew all about him, in Zola. And the peculiar condescension with which she would give him her order, as if she, frail, beautiful thing, were the only reality, and he, coarse monster, was a sort of Caliban floundering in the mud on the margin of the pool of the perfect lotus, would suddenly enrage the fellow, the real Mediterranean who prided himself on his beauté male, and to whom the phallic mystery was still the only mystery. And he would turn a terrible face on her, bully her in a brutal, coarse fashion—hideous. For to him she had only the blasphemous impertinence of her own sterility.

Encounters like these made her tremble, and made her know she must have support from the outside. The power of her spirit did not extend to these low people, and they had all the physical power. She realised an implacability of hatred in their turning on her. But she did not lose her head. She quietly paid out money and turned away.

Those were dangerous moments, though, and she learned to be prepared for them. The Princess she was, and the fairy from the North, and could never understand the volcanic phallic rage with which coarse people could turn on her in a paroxysm of hatred. They never turned on her father like that. And quite early she decided it was the New England mother in her whom they hated. Never for one minute could she see with the old Roman eyes, see herself as sterility, the barren flower taking on airs and an intolerable impertinence. This was what the Roman cabman saw in her. And he longed to crush the barren blossom. Its sexless beauty and its authority put him in a passion of brutal revolt.

When she was nineteen her grandfather died, leaving her a considerable fortune in the safe hands of responsible trustees. They would deliver her her income, but only on condition that she resided for six months in the year in the United States.

“Why should they make me conditions?” she said to her father. “I refuse to be imprisoned six months in the year in the United States. We will tell them to keep their money.”

“Let us be wise, my little Princess, let us be wise. No, we are almost poor, and we are never safe from rudeness. I cannot allow anybody to be rude to me. I hate it, I hate it!” His eyes flamed as he said it. “I could kill any man or woman who is rude to me. But we are in exile in the world. We are powerless. If we were really poor, we should be quite powerless, and then I should die. No, my Princess. Let us take their money, then they will not dare to be rude to us. Let us take it, as we put on clothes, to cover ourselves from their aggressions.”

There began a new phase, when the father and daughter spent their summers on the Great Lakes or in California, or in the South–West. The father was something of a poet, the daughter something of a painter. He wrote poems about the lakes or the redwood trees, and she made dainty drawings. He was physically a strong man, and he loved the out-of-doors. He would go off with her for days, paddling in a canoe and sleeping by a camp-fire. Frail little Princess, she was always undaunted, always undaunted. She would ride with him on horseback over the mountain trails till she was so tired she was nothing but a bodiless consciousness sitting astride her pony. But she never gave in. And at night he folded her in her blanket on a bed of balsam pine twigs, and she lay and looked at the stars unmurmuring. She was fulfilling her r?le.

People said to her as the years passed, and she was a woman of twenty-five, then a woman of thirty, and always the same virgin dainty Princess, “knowing” in a dispassionate way, like an old woman, and utterly intact:

“Don’t you ever think what you will do when your father is no longer with you?”

She looked at her interlocutor with that cold, elfin detachment of hers:

“No, I never think of it,” she said.

She had a tiny, but exquisite little house in London, and another small, perfect house in Connecticut, each with a faithful housekeeper. Two homes, if she chose. And she knew many interesting literary and artistic people. What more?

So the years passed imperceptibly. And she had that quality of the sexless fairies, she did not change. At thirty-three she looked twenty-three.

Her father, however, was ageing, and becoming more and more queer. It was now her task to be his guardian in his private madness. He spent the last three years of life in the house in Connecticut. He was very much estranged, sometimes had fits of violence which almost killed the little Princess. Physical violence was horrible to her; it seemed to shatter her heart. But she found a woman a few years younger than herself, well-educated and sensitive, to be a sort of nurse-companion to the mad old man. So the fact of madness was never openly admitted. Miss Cummins, the companion, had a passionate loyalty to the Princess, and a curious affection, tinged with love, for the handsome, white-haired, courteous old man, who was never at all aware of his fits of violence once they had passed.

The Princess was thirty-eight years old when her father died. And quite unchanged. She was still tiny, and like a dignified, scentless flower. Her soft brownish hair, almost the colour of beaver fur, was bobbed, and fluffed softly round her apple-blossom face, that was modelled with an arched nose like a proud old Florentine portrait. In her voice, manner and bearing she was exceedingly still, like a flower that has blossomed in a shadowy place. And from her blue eyes looked out the Princess’s eternal laconic challenge, that grew almost sardonic as the years passed. She was the Princess, and sardonically she looked out on a princeless world.

She was relieved when her father died, and at the same time, it was as if everything had evaporated around her. She had lived in a sort of hot-house, in the aura of her father’s madness. Suddenly the hot-house had been removed from around her, and she was in the raw, vast, vulgar open air.

Quoi faire? What was she to do? She seemed faced with absolute nothingness. Only she had Miss Cummins, who shared with her the secret, and almost the passion for her father. In fact, the Princess felt that her passion for her mad father had in some curious way transferred itself largely to Charlotte Cummins during the last years. And now Miss Cummins was the vessel that held the passion for the dead man. She herself, the Princess, was an empty vessel.

An empty vessel in the enormous warehouse of the world.

Quoi faire? What was she to do? She felt that, since she could not evaporate into nothingness, like alcohol from an unstoppered bottle, she must DO something. Never before in her life had she felt the incumbency. Never, never had she felt she must Do anything. That was left to the vulgar.

Now her father was dead, she found herself on the fringe of the vulgar crowd, sharing their necessity to Do something. It was a little humiliating. She felt herself becoming vulgarised. At the same time she found herself looking at men with a shrewder eye: an eye to marriage. Not that she felt any sudden interest in men, or attraction towards them. No. She was still neither interested nor attracted towards men vitally. But marriage, that peculiar abstraction, had imposed a sort of spell on her. She thought that marriage, in the blank abstract, was the thing she ought to do. That marriage implied a man she also knew. She knew all the facts. But the man seemed a property of her own mind rather than a thing in himself, another thing.

Her father died in the summer, the month after her thirty-eighth birthday. When all was over, the obvious thing to do, of course, was to travel. With Miss Cummins. The two women knew each other intimately, but they were always Miss Urquhart and Miss Cummins to one another, and a certain distance was instinctively maintained. Miss Cummins, from Philadelphia, of scholastic stock, and intelligent but untravelled, four years younger than the Princess, felt herself immensely the junior of her “lady”. She had a sort of passionate veneration for the Princess, who seemed to her ageless, timeless. She could not see the rows of tiny, dainty, exquisite shoes in the Princess’s cupboard without feeling a stab at the heart, a stab of tenderness and reverence, almost of awe.

Miss Cummins also was virginal, but with a look of puzzled surprise in her brown eyes. Her skin was pale and clear, her features well modelled, but there was a certain blankness in her expression, where the Princess had an odd touch of Renaissance grandeur. Miss Cummins’s voice was also hushed almost to a whisper; it was the inevitable effect of Colin Urquhart’s room. But the hushedness had a hoarse quality.

The Princess did not want to go to Europe. Her face seemed turned west. Now her father was gone, she felt she would go west, westwards, as if for ever. Following, no doubt, the March of Empire, which is brought up rather short on the Pacific coast, among swarms of wallowing bathers.

No, not the Pacific coast. She would stop short of that. The South–West was less vulgar. She would go to New Mexico.

She and Miss Cummins arrived at the Rancho del Cerro Gordo towards the end of August, when the crowd was beginning to drift back east. The ranch lay by a stream on the desert some four miles from the foot of the mountains, a mile away from the Indian pueblo of San Cristobal. It was a ranch for the rich; the Princess paid thirty dollars a day for herself and Miss Cummins. But then she had a little cottage to herself, among the apple trees of the orchard, with an excellent cook. She and Miss Cummins, however, took dinner at evening in the large guest-house. For the Princess still entertained the idea of marriage.

The guests at the Rancho del Cerro Gordo were of all sorts, except the poor sort. They were practically all rich, and many were romantic. Some were charming, others were vulgar, some were movie people, quite quaint and not unattractive in their vulgarity, and many were Jews. The Princess did not care for Jews, though they were usually the most interesting to talk to. So she talked a good deal with the Jews, and painted with the artists, and rode with the young men from college, and had altogether quite a good time. And yet she felt something of a fish out of water, or a bird in the wrong forest. And marriage remained still completely in the abstract. No connecting it with any of these young men, even the nice ones.

The Princess looked just twenty-five. The freshness of her mouth, the hushed, delicate-complexioned virginity of her face gave her not a day more. Only a certain laconic look in her eyes was disconcerting. When she was forced to write her age, she put twenty-eight, making the figure two rather badly, so that it just avoided being a three.

Men hinted marriage at her. Especially boys from college suggested it from a distance. But they all failed before the look of sardonic ridicule in the Princess’s eyes. It always seemed to her rather preposterous, quite ridiculous, and a tiny bit impertinent on their part.

The only man that intrigued her at all was one of the guides, a man called Romero—Domingo Romero. It was he who had sold the ranch itself to the Wilkiesons, ten years before, for two thousand dollars. He had gone away, then reappeared at the old place. For he was the son of the old Romero, the last of the Spanish family that had owned miles of land around San Cristobal. But the coming of the white man and the failure of the vast flocks of sheep, and the fatal inertia which overcomes all men, at last, on the desert near the mountains, had finished the Romero family. The last descendants were just Mexican peasants.

Domingo, the heir, had spent his two thousand dollars, and was working for white people. He was now about thirty years old, a tall, silent fellow, with a heavy closed mouth and black eyes that looked across at one almost sullenly. From behind he was handsome, with a strong, natural body, and the back of his neck very dark and well-shapen, strong with life. But his dark face was long and heavy, almost sinister, with that peculiar heavy meaninglessness in it, characteristic of the Mexicans of his own locality. They are strong, they seem healthy. They laugh and joke with one another. But their physique and their natures seem static, as if there were nowhere, nowhere at all for their energies to go, and their faces, degenerating to misshapen heaviness, seem to have no raison d’être, no radical meaning. Waiting either to die or to be aroused into passion and hope. In some of the black eyes a queer, haunting mystic quality, sombre and a bit gruesome, the skull-and-cross-bones look of the Penitentes. They had found their raison d’être in self-torture and death-worship. Unable to wrest a POSITIVE significance for themselves from the vast, beautiful, but vindictive landscape they were born into, they turned on their own selves, and worshipped death through self-torture. The mystic gloom of this showed in their eyes.

But as a rule the dark eyes of the Mexicans were heavy and half alive, sometimes hostile, sometimes kindly, often with the fatal Indian glaze on them, or the fatal Indian glint.

Domingo Romero was almost a typical Mexican to look at, with the typical heavy, dark, long face, clean-shaven, with an almost brutally heavy mouth. His eyes were black and Indian-looking. Only, at the centre of their hopelessness was a spark of pride, or self-confidence, or dauntlessness. Just a spark in the midst of the blackness of static despair.

But this spark was the difference between him and the mass of men. It gave a certain alert sensitiveness to his bearing and a certain beauty to his appearance. He wore a low-crowned black hat, instead of the ponderous headgear of the usual Mexican, and his clothes were thinnish and graceful. Silent, aloof, almost imperceptible in the landscape, he was an admirable guide, with a startling quick intelligence that anticipated difficulties about to rise. He could cook, too, crouching over the camp-fire and moving his lean deft brown hands. The only fault he had was that he was not forthcoming, he wasn’t chatty and cosy.

“Oh, don’t send Romero with us,” the Jews would say. “One can’t get any response from him.”

Tourists come and go, but they rarely see anything, inwardly. None of them ever saw the spark at the middle of Romero’s eye; they were not alive enough to see it.

The Princess caught it one day, when she had him for a guide. She was fishing for trout in the canyon, Miss Cummins was reading a book, the horses were tied under the trees, Romero was fixing a proper fly on her line. He fixed the fly and handed her the line, looking up at her. And at that moment she caught the spark in his eye. And instantly she knew that he was a gentleman, that his “demon”, as her father would have said, was a fine demon. And instantly her manner towards him changed.

He had perched her on a rock over a quiet pool, beyond the cotton-wood trees. It was early September, and the canyon already cool, but the leaves of the cottonwoods were still green. The Princess stood on her rock, a small but perfectly-formed figure, wearing a soft, close grey sweater and neatly-cut grey riding-breeches, with tall black boots, her fluffy brown hair straggling from under a little grey felt hat. A woman? Not quite. A changeling of some sort, perched in outline there on the rock, in the bristling wild canyon. She knew perfectly well how to handle a line. Her father had made a fisherman of her.

Romero, in a black shirt and with loose black trousers pushed into wide black riding-boots, was fishing a little farther down. He had put his hat on a rock behind him; his dark head was bent a little forward, watching the water. He had caught three trout. From time to time he glanced up-stream at the Princess, perched there so daintily. He saw she had caught nothing.

Soon he quietly drew in his line and came up to her. His keen eye watched her line, watched her position. Then, quietly, he suggested certain changes to her, putting his sensitive brown hand before her. And he withdrew a little, and stood in silence, leaning against a tree, watching her. He was helping her across the distance. She knew it, and thrilled. And in a moment she had a bite. In two minutes she landed a good trout. She looked round at him quickly, her eyes sparkling, the colour heightened in her cheeks. And as she met his eyes a smile of greeting went over his dark face, very sudden, with an odd sweetness.

She knew he was helping her. And she felt in his presence a subtle, insidious male kindliness she had never known before waiting upon her. Her cheek flushed, and her blue eyes darkened.

After this, she always looked for him, and for that curious dark beam of a man’s kindliness which he could give her, as it were, from his chest, from his heart. It was something she had never known before.

A vague, unspoken intimacy grew up between them. She liked his voice, his appearance, his presence. His natural language was Spanish; he spoke English like a foreign language, rather slow, with a slight hesitation, but with a sad, plangent sonority lingering over from his Spanish. There was a certain subtle correctness in his appearance; he was always perfectly shaved; his hair was thick and rather long on top, but always carefully groomed behind. And his fine black cashmere shirt, his wide leather belt, his well-cut, wide black trousers going into the embroidered cowboy boots had a certain inextinguishable elegance. He wore no silver rings or buckles. Only his boots were embroidered and decorated at the top with an inlay of white suède. He seemed elegant, slender, yet he was very strong.

And at the same time, curiously, he gave her the feeling that death was not far from him. Perhaps he too was half in love with death. However that may be, the sense she had that death was not far from him made him “possible” to her.

Small as she was, she was quite a good horsewoman. They gave her at the ranch a sorrel mare, very lovely in colour, and well-made, with a powerful broad neck and the hollow back that betokens a swift runner. Tansy, she was called. Her only fault was the usual mare’s failing, she was inclined to be hysterical.

So that every day the Princess set off with Miss Cummins and Romero, on horseback, riding into the mountains. Once they went camping for several days, with two more friends in the party.

“I think I like it better,” the Princess said to Romero, “when we three go alone.”

And he gave her one of his quick, transfiguring smiles.

It was curious no white man had ever showed her this capacity for subtle gentleness, this power to HELP her in silence across a distance, if she were fishing without success, or tired of her horse, or if Tansy suddenly got scared. It was as if Romero could send her from his heart a dark beam of succour and sustaining. She had never known this before, and it was very thrilling.

Then the smile that suddenly creased his dark face, showing the strong white teeth. It creased his face almost into a savage grotesque. And at the same time there was in it something so warm, such a dark flame of kindliness for her, she was elated into her true Princess self.

Then that vivid, latent spark in his eye, which she had seen, and which she knew he was aware she had seen. It made an inter-recognition between them, silent and delicate. Here he was delicate as a woman in this subtle inter-recognition.

And yet his presence only put to flight in her the idée fixe of “marriage”. For some reason, in her strange little brain, the idea of marrying him could not enter. Not for any definite reason. He was in himself a gentleman, and she had plenty of money for two. There was no actual obstacle. Nor was she conventional.

No, now she came down to it, it was as if their two “d?mons” could marry, were perhaps married. Only their two selves, Miss Urquhart and Se?or Domingo Romero, were for some reason incompatible. There was a peculiar subtle intimacy of inter-recognition between them. But she did not see in the least how it would lead to marriage. Almost she could more easily marry one of the nice boys from Harvard or Yale.

The time passed, and she let it pass. The end of September came, with aspens going yellow on the mountain heights, and oak-scrub going red. But as yet the cottonwoods in the valley and canyons had not changed.

“When will you go away?” Romero asked her, looking at her fixedly, with a blank black eye.

“By the end of October,” she said. “I have promised to be in Santa Barbara at the beginning of November.”

He was hiding the spark in his eye from her. But she saw the peculiar sullen thickening of his heavy mouth.

She had complained to him many times that one never saw any wild animals, except chipmunks and squirrels, and perhaps a skunk and a porcupine. Never a deer, or a bear, or a mountain lion.

“Are there no bigger animals in these mountains?” she asked, dissatisfied.

“Yes,” he said. “There are deer—I see their tracks. And I saw the tracks of a bear.”

“But why can one never see the animals themselves?” She looked dissatisfied and wistful like a child.

“Why, it’s pretty hard for you to see them. They won’t let you come close. You have to keep still, in a place where they come. Or else you have to follow their tracks a long way.”

“I can’t bear to go away till I’ve seen them: a bear, or a deer—”

The smile came suddenly on his face, indulgent.

“Well, what do you want? Do you want to go up into the mountains to some place, to wait till they come?”

“Yes,” she said, looking up at him with a sudden na?ve impulse of recklessness.

And immediately his face became sombre again, responsible.

“Well,” he said, with slight irony, a touch of mockery of her. “You will have to find a house. It’s very cold at night now. You would have to stay all night in a house.”

“And there are no houses up there?” she said.

“Yes,” he replied. “There is a little shack that belongs to me, that a miner built a long time ago, looking for gold. You can go there and stay one night, and maybe you see something. Maybe! I don’t know. Maybe nothing come.”

“How much chance is there?”

“Well, I don’t know. Last time when I was there I see three deer come down to drink at the water, and I shot two raccoons. But maybe this time we don’t see anything.”

“Is there water there?” she asked.

“Yes, there is a little round pond, you know, below the spruce trees. And the water from the snow runs into it.”

“Is it far away?” she asked.

“Yes, pretty far. You see that ridge there”—and turning to the mountains he lifted his arm in the gesture which is somehow so moving, out in the West, pointing to the distance—“that ridge where there are no trees, only rock”—his black eyes were focussed on the distance, his face impassive, but as if in pain—“you go round that ridge, and along, then you come down through the spruce trees to where that cabin is. My father bought that placer claim from a miner who was broke, but nobody ever found any gold or anything, and nobody ever goes there. Too lonesome!”

The Princess watched the massive, heavy-sitting, beautiful bulk of the Rocky Mountains. It was early in October, and the aspens were already losing their gold leaves; high up, the spruce and pine seemed to be growing darker; the great flat patches of oak scrub on the heights were red like gore.

“Can I go over there?” she asked, turning to him and meeting the spark in his eye.

His face was heavy with responsibility.

“Yes,” he said, “you can go. But there’ll be snow over the ridge, and it’s awful cold, and awful lonesome.”

“I should like to go,” she said, persistent.

“All right,” he said. “You can go if you want to.”

She doubted, though, if the Wilkiesons would let her go; at least alone with Romero and Miss Cummins.

Yet an obstinacy characteristic of her nature, an obstinacy tinged perhaps with madness, had taken hold of her. She wanted to look over the mountains into their secret heart. She wanted to descend to the cabin below the spruce trees, near the tarn of bright green water. She wanted to see the wild animals move about in their wild unconsciousness.

“Let us say to the Wilkiesons that we want to make the trip round the Frijoles canyon,” she said.

The trip round the Frijoles canyon was a usual thing. It would not be strenuous, nor cold, nor lonely: they could sleep in the log house that was called an hotel.

Romero looked at her quickly.

“If you want to say that,” he replied, “you can tell Mrs. Wilkieson. Only I know she’ll be mad with me if I take you up in the mountains to that place. And I’ve got to go there first with a pack-horse, to take lots of blankets and some bread. Maybe Miss Cummins can’t stand it. Maybe not. It’s a hard trip.”

He was speaking, and thinking, in the heavy, disconnected Mexican fashion.

“Never mind!” The Princess was suddenly very decisive and stiff with authority. “I want to do it. I will arrange with Mrs. Wilkieson. And we’ll go on Saturday.”

He shook his head slowly.

“I’ve got to go up on Sunday with a pack-horse and blankets,” he said. “Can’t do it before.”

“Very well!” she said, rather piqued. “Then we’ll start on Monday.”

She hated being thwarted even the tiniest bit.

He knew that if he started with the pack on Sunday at dawn he would not be back until late at night. But he consented that they should start on Monday morning at seven. The obedient Miss Cummins was told to prepare for the Frijoles trip. On Sunday Romero had his day off. He had not put in an appearance when the Princess retired on Sunday night, but on Monday morning, as she was dressing, she saw him bringing in the three horses from the corral. She was in high spirits.

The night had been cold. There was ice at the edges of the irrigation ditch, and the chipmunks crawled into the sun and lay with wide, dumb, anxious eyes, almost too numb to run.

“We may be away two or three days,” said the Princess.

“Very well. We won’t begin to be anxious about you before Thursday, then,” said Mrs. Wilkieson, who was young and capable: from Chicago. “Anyway,” she added, “Romero will see you through. He’s so trustworthy.”

The sun was already on the desert as they set off towards the mountains, making the greasewood and the sage pale as pale-grey sands, luminous the great level around them. To the right glinted the shadows of the adobe pueblo, flat and almost invisible on the plain, earth of its earth. Behind lay the ranch and the tufts of tall, plumy cottonwoods, whose summits were yellowing under the perfect blue sky.

Autumn breaking into colour in the great spaces of the South–West.

But the three trotted gently along the trail, towards the sun that sparkled yellow just above the dark bulk of the ponderous mountains. Side-slopes were already gleaming yellow, flaming with a second light, under coldish blue of the pale sky. The front slopes were in shadow, with submerged lustre of red oak scrub and dull-gold aspens, blue-black pines and grey-blue rock. While the canyon was full of a deep blueness.

They rode single file, Romero first, on a black horse. Himself in black, made a flickering black spot in the delicate pallor of the great landscape, where even pine trees at a distance take a film of blue paler than their green. Romero rode on in silence past the tufts of furry greasewood. The Princess came next, on her sorrel mare. And Miss Cummins, who was not quite happy on horseback, came last, in the pale dust that the others kicked up. Sometimes her horse sneezed, and she started.

But on they went at a gentle trot. Romero never looked round. He could hear the sound of the hoofs following, and that was all he wanted.

For the rest, he held ahead. And the Princess, with that black, unheeding figure always travelling away from her, felt strangely helpless, withal elated.

They neared the pale, round foot-hills, dotted with the round dark pi?on and cedar shrubs. The horses clinked and trotted among the stones. Occasionally a big round greasewood held out fleecy tufts of flowers, pure gold. They wound into blue shadow, then up a steep stony slope, with the world lying pallid away behind and below. Then they dropped into the shadow of the San Cristobal canyon.

The stream was running full and swift. Occasionally the horses snatched at a tuft of grass. The trail narrowed and became rocky; the rocks closed in; it was dark and cool as the horses climbed and climbed upwards, and the tree trunks crowded in the shadowy, silent tightness of the canyon. They were among cottonwood trees that ran straight up and smooth and round to an extraordinary height. Above, the tips were gold, and it was sun. But away below, where the horses struggled up the rocks and wound among the trunks, there was still blue shadow by the sound of waters and an occasional grey festoon of old man’s beard, and here and there a pale, dripping crane’s-bill flower among the tangle and the débris of the virgin place. And again the chill entered the Princess’s heart as she realised what a tangle of decay and despair lay in the virgin forests.

They scrambled downwards, splashed across stream, up rocks and along the trail of the other side. Romero’s black horse stopped, looked down quizzically at the fallen trees, then stepped over lightly. The Princess’s sorrel followed, carefully. But Miss Cummins’s buckskin made a fuss, and had to be got round.

In the same silence, save for the clinking of the horses and the splashing as the trail crossed stream, they worked their way upwards in the tight, tangled shadow of the canyon. Sometimes, crossing stream, the Princess would glance upwards, and then always her heart caught in her breast. For high up, away in heaven, the mountain heights shone yellow, dappled with dark spruce firs, clear almost as speckled daffodils against the pale turquoise blue lying high and serene above the dark-blue shadow where the Princess was. And she would snatch at the blood-red leaves of the oak as her horse crossed a more open slope, not knowing what she felt.

They were getting fairly high, occasionally lifted above the canyon itself, in the low groove below the speckled, gold-sparkling heights which towered beyond. Then again they dipped and crossed stream, the horses stepping gingerly across a tangle of fallen, frail aspen stems, then suddenly floundering in a mass of rocks. The black emerged ahead, his black tail waving. The Princess let her mare find her own footing; then she too emerged from the clatter. She rode on after the black. Then came a great frantic rattle of the buckskin behind. The Princess was aware of Romero’s dark face looking round, with a strange, demon-like watchfulness, before she herself looked round, to see the buckskin scrambling rather lamely beyond the rocks, with one of his pale buff knees already red with blood.

“He almost went down!” called Miss Cummins.

But Romero was already out of the saddle and hastening down the path. He made quiet little noises to the buckskin, and began examining the cut knee.

“Is he hurt?” cried Miss Cummins anxiously, and she climbed hastily down.

“Oh, my goodness!” she cried, as she saw the blood running down the slender buff leg of the horse in a thin trickle. “Isn’t that awful?” She spoke in a stricken voice, and her face was white.

Romero was still carefully feeling the knee of the buckskin. Then he made him walk a few paces. And at last he stood up straight and shook his head.

“Not very bad!” he said. “Nothing broken.”

Again he bent and worked at the knees. Then he looked up at the Princess.

“He can go on,” he said. “It’s not bad.”

The Princess looked down at the dark face in silence.

“What, go on right up here?” cried Miss Cummins. “How many hours?”

“About five!” said Romero simply.

“Five hours!” cried Miss Cummins. “A horse with a lame knee! And a steep mountain! Why-y!”

“Yes, it’s pretty steep up there,” said Romero, pushing back his hat and staring fixedly at the bleeding knee. The buckskin stood in a stricken sort of dejection. “But I think he’ll make it all right,” the man added.

“Oh!” cried Miss Cummins, her eyes bright with sudden passion of unshed tears. “I wouldn’t think of it. I wouldn’t ride him up there, not for any money.”

“Why wouldn’t you?” asked Romero.

“It hurts him.”

Romero bent down again to the horse’s knee.

“Maybe it hurts him a little,” he said. “But he can make it all right, and his leg won’t get stiff.”

“What! Ride him five hours up the steep mountains?” cried Miss Cummins. “I couldn’t. I just couldn’t do it. I’ll lead him a little way and see if he can go. But I couldn’t ride him again. I couldn’t. Let me walk.”

“But Miss Cummins, dear, if Romero says he’ll be all right?” said the Princess.

“I know it hurts him. Oh, I just couldn’t bear it.”

There was no doing anything with Miss Cummins. The thought of a hurt animal always put her into a sort of hysterics.

They walked forward a little, leading the buckskin. He limped rather badly. Miss Cummins sat on a rock.

“Why, it’s agony to see him!” she cried. “It’s cruel!”

“He won’t limp after a bit, if you take no notice of him,” said Romero. “Now he plays up, and limps very much, because he wants to make you see.”

“I don’t think there can be much playing up,” said Miss Cummins bitterly. “We can see how it must hurt him.”

“It don’t hurt much,” said Romero.

But now Miss Cummins was silent with antipathy.

It was a deadlock. The party remained motionless on the trail, the Princess in the saddle, Miss Cummins seated on a rock, Romero standing black and remote near the drooping buckskin.

“Well!” said the man suddenly at last. “I guess we go back, then.”

And he looked up swiftly at his horse, which was cropping at the mountain herbage and treading on the trailing reins.

“No!” cried the Princess. “Oh no!” Her voice rang with a great wail of disappointment and anger. Then she checked herself.

Miss Cummins rose with energy.

“Let me lead the buckskin home,” she said, with cold dignity, “and you two go on.”

This was received in silence. The Princess was looking down at her with a sardonic, almost cruel gaze.

“We’ve only come about two hours,” said Miss Cummins. “I don’t mind a bit leading him home. But I couldn’t ride him. I couldn’t have him ridden with that knee.”

This again was received in dead silence. Romero remained impassive, almost inert.

“Very well, then,” said the Princess. “You lead him home. You’ll be quite all right. Nothing can happen to you, possibly. And say to them that we have gone on and shall be home tomorrow—or the day after.”

She spoke coldly and distinctly. For she could not bear to be thwarted.

“Better all go back, and come again another day,” said Romero—non-committal.

“There will never BE another day,” cried the Princess. “I want to go on.”

She looked at him square in the eyes, and met the spark in his eye.

He raised his shoulders slightly.

“If you want it,” he said. “I’ll go on with you. But Miss Cummins can ride my horse to the end of the canyon, and I lead the buckskin. Then I come back to you.”

It was arranged so. Miss Cummins had her saddle put on Romero’s black horse, Romero took the buckskin’s bridle, and they started back. The Princess rode very slowly on, upwards, alone. She was at first so angry with Miss Cummins that she was blind to everything else. She just let her mare follow her own inclinations.

The peculiar spell of anger carried the Princess on, almost unconscious, for an hour or so. And by this time she was beginning to climb pretty high. Her horse walked steadily all the time. They emerged on a bare slope, and the trail wound through frail aspen stems. Here a wind swept, and some of the aspens were already bare. Others were fluttering their discs of pure, solid yellow leaves, so nearly like petals, while the slope ahead was one soft, glowing fleece of daffodil yellow; fleecy like a golden foxskin, and yellow as daffodils alive in the wind and the high mountain sun.

She paused and looked back. The near great slopes were mottled with gold and the dark hue of spruce, like some unsinged eagle, and the light lay gleaming upon them. Away through the gap of the canyon she could see the pale blue of the egg-like desert, with the crumpled dark crack of the Rio Grande Canyon. And far, far off, the blue mountains like a fence of angels on the horizon.

And she thought of her adventure. She was going on alone with Romero. But then she was very sure of herself, and Romero was not the kind of man to do anything to her against her will. This was her first thought. And she just had a fixed desire to go over the brim of the mountains, to look into the inner chaos of the Rockies. And she wanted to go with Romero, because he had some peculiar kinship with her; there was some peculiar link between the two of them. Miss Cummins anyhow would have been only a discordant note.

She rode on, and emerged at length in the lap of the summit. Beyond her was a great concave of stone and stark, dead-grey trees, where the mountain ended against the sky. But nearer was the dense black, bristling spruce, and at her feet was the lap of the summit, a flat little valley of sere grass and quiet-standing yellow aspens, the stream trickling like a thread across.

It was a little valley or shell from which the stream was gently poured into the lower rocks and trees of the canyon. Around her was a fairy-like gentleness, the delicate sere grass, the groves of delicate-stemmed aspens dropping their flakes of bright yellow. And the delicate, quick little stream threading through the wild, sere grass.

Here one might expect deer and fawns and wild things, as in a little paradise. Here she was to wait for Romero, and they were to have lunch.

She unfastened her saddle and pulled it to the ground with a crash, letting her horse wander with a long rope. How beautiful Tansy looked, sorrel, among the yellow leaves that lay like a patina on the sere ground. The Princess herself wore a fleecy sweater of a pale, sere buff, like the grass, and riding-breeches of a pure orange-tawny colour. She felt quite in the picture.

From her saddle-pouches she took the packages of lunch, spread a little cloth, and sat to wait for Romero. Then she made a little fire. Then she ate a devilled egg. Then she ran after Tansy, who was straying across-stream. Then she sat in the sun, in the stillness near the aspens, and waited.

The sky was blue. Her little alp was soft and delicate as fairy-land. But beyond and up jutted the great slopes, dark with the pointed feathers of spruce, bristling with grey dead trees among grey rock, or dappled with dark and gold. The beautiful, but fierce, heavy cruel mountains, with their moments of tenderness.

She saw Tansy start, and begin to run. Two ghost-like figures on horseback emerged from the black of the spruce across the stream. It was two Indians on horseback, swathed like seated mummies in their pale-grey cotton blankets. Their guns jutted beyond the saddles. They rode straight towards her, to her thread of smoke.

As they came near, they unswathed themselves and greeted her, looking at her curiously from their dark eyes. Their black hair was somewhat untidy, the long rolled plaits on their shoulders were soiled. They looked tired.

They got down from their horses near her little fire—a camp was a camp—swathed their blankets round their hips, pulled the saddles from their ponies and turned them loose, then sat down. One was a young Indian whom she had met before, the other was an older man.

“You all alone?” said the younger man.

“Romero will be here in a minute,” she said, glancing back along the trail.

“Ah, Romero! You with him? Where are you going?”

“Round the ridge,” she said. “Where are you going?”

“We going down to Pueblo.”

“Been out hunting? How long have you been out?”

“Yes. Been out five days.” The young Indian gave a little meaningless laugh.

“Got anything?”

“No. We see tracks of two deer—but not got nothing.”

The Princess noticed a suspicious-looking bulk under one of the saddles—surely a folded-up deer. But she said nothing.

“You must have been cold,” she said.

“Yes, very cold in the night. And hungry. Got nothing to eat since yesterday. Eat it all up.” And again he laughed his little meaningless laugh. Under their dark skins, the two men looked peaked and hungry. The Princess rummaged for food among the saddle-bags. There was a lump of bacon—the regular stand-back—and some bread. She gave them this, and they began toasting slices of it on long sticks at the fire. Such was the little camp Romero saw as he rode down the slope: the Princess in her orange breeches, her head tied in a blue-and-brown silk kerchief, sitting opposite the two dark-headed Indians across the camp-fire, while one of the Indians was leaning forward toasting bacon, his two plaits of braid-hair dangling as if wearily.

Romero rode up, his face expressionless. The Indians greeted him in Spanish. He unsaddled his horse, took food from the bags, and sat down at the camp to eat. The Princess went to the stream for water, and to wash her hands.

“Got coffee?” asked the Indians.

“No coffee this outfit,” said Romero.

They lingered an hour or more in the warm midday sun. Then Romero saddled the horses. The Indians still squatted by the fire. Romero and the Princess rode away, calling Adios! to the Indians over the stream and into the dense spruce whence two strange figures had emerged.

When they were alone, Romero turned and looked at her curiously, in a way she could not understand, with such a hard glint in his eyes. And for the first time she wondered if she was rash.

“I hope you don’t mind going alone with me,” she said.

“If you want it,” he replied.

They emerged at the foot of the great bare slope of rocky summit, where dead spruce trees stood sparse and bristling like bristles on a grey dead hog. Romero said the Mexicans, twenty years back, had fired the mountains, to drive out the whites. This grey concave slope of summit was corpse-like.

The trail was almost invisible. Romero watched for the trees which the Forest Service had blazed. And they climbed the stark corpse slope, among dead spruce, fallen and ash-grey, into the wind. The wind came rushing from the west, up the funnel of the canyon, from the desert. And there was the desert, like a vast mirage tilting slowly upwards towards the west, immense and pallid, away beyond the funnel of the canyon. The Princess could hardly look.

For an hour their horses rushed the slope, hastening with a great working of the haunches upwards, and halting to breathe, scrambling again, and rowing their way up length by length, on the livid, slanting wall. While the wind blew like some vast machine.

After an hour they were working their way on the incline, no longer forcing straight up. All was grey and dead around them; the horses picked their way over the silver-grey corpses of the spruce. But they were near the top, near the ridge.

Even the horses made a rush for the last bit. They had worked round to a scrap of spruce forest near the very top. They hurried in, out of the huge, monstrous, mechanical wind, that whistled inhumanly and was palely cold. So, stepping through the dark screen of trees, they emerged over the crest.

In front now was nothing but mountains, ponderous, massive, down-sitting mountains, in a huge and intricate knot, empty of life or soul. Under the bristling black feathers of spruce near-by lay patches of white snow. The lifeless valleys were concaves of rock and spruce, the rounded summits and the hog-backed summits of grey rock crowded one behind the other like some monstrous herd in arrest.

It frightened the Princess, it was so inhuman. She had not thought it could be so inhuman, so, as it were, anti-life. And yet now one of her desires was fulfilled. She had seen it, the massive, gruesome, repellent core of the Rockies. She saw it there beneath her eyes, in its gigantic, heavy gruesomeness.

And she wanted to go back. At this moment she wanted to turn back. She had looked down into the intestinal knot of these mountains. She was frightened. She wanted to go back.

But Romero was riding on, on the lee side of the spruce forest, above the concaves of the inner mountains. He turned round to her and pointed at the slope with a dark hand.

“Here a miner has been trying for gold,” he said. It was a grey scratched-out heap near a hole—like a great badger hole. And it looked quite fresh.

“Quite lately?” said the Princess.

“No, long ago—twenty, thirty years.” He had reined in his horse and was looking at the mountains. “Look!” he said. “There goes the Forest Service trail—along those ridges, on the top, way over there till it comes to Lucytown, where is the Goverment road. We go down there—no trail—see behind that mountain—you see the top, no trees, and some grass?”

His arm was lifted, his brown hand pointing, his dark eyes piercing into the distance, as he sat on his black horse twisting round to her. Strange and ominous, only the demon of himself, he seemed to her. She was dazed and a little sick, at that height, and she could not see any more. Only she saw an eagle turning in the air beyond, and the light from the west showed the pattern on him underneath.

“Shall I ever be able to go so far?” asked the Princess faintly, petulantly.

“Oh yes! All easy now. No more hard places.”

They worked along the ridge, up and down, keeping on the lee side, the inner side, in the dark shadow. It was cold. Then the trail laddered up again, and they emerged on a narrow ridge-track, with the mountain slipping away enormously on either side. The Princess was afraid. For one moment she looked out, and saw the desert, the desert ridges, more desert, more blue ridges, shining pale and very vast, far below, vastly palely tilting to the western horizon. It was ethereal and terrifying in its gleaming, pale, half-burnished immensity, tilted at the west. She could not bear it. To the left was the ponderous, involved mass of mountains all kneeling heavily.

She closed her eyes and let her consciousness evaporate away. The mare followed the trail. So on and on, in the wind again.

They turned their backs to the wind, facing inwards to the mountains. She thought they had left the trail; it was quite invisible.

“No,” he said, lifting his hand and pointing. “Don’t you see the blazed trees?”

And making an effort of consciousness, she was able to perceive on a pale-grey dead spruce stem the old marks where an axe had chipped a piece away. But with the height, the cold, the wind, her brain was numb.

They turned again and began to descend; he told her they had left the trail. The horses slithered in the loose stones, picking their way downward. It was afternoon, the sun stood obtrusive and gleaming in the lower heavens—about four o’clock. The horses went steadily, slowly, but obstinately onwards. The air was getting colder. They were in among the lumpish peaks and steep concave valleys. She was barely conscious at all of Romero.

He dismounted and came to help her from her saddle. She tottered, but would not betray her feebleness.

“We must slide down here,” he said. “I can lead the horses.”

They were on a ridge, and facing a steep bare slope of pallid, tawny mountain grass on which the western sun shone full. It was steep and concave. The Princess felt she might start slipping, and go down like a toboggan into the great hollow.

But she pulled herself together. Her eye blazed up again with excitement and determination. A wind rushed past her; she could hear the shriek of spruce trees far below. Bright spots came on her cheeks as her hair blew across. She looked a wild, fairy-like little thing.

“No,” she said. “I will take my horse.”

“Then mind she doesn’t slip down on top of you,” said Romero. And away he went, nimbly dropping down the pale, steep incline, making from rock to rock, down the grass, and following any little slanting groove. His horse hopped and slithered after him, and sometimes stopped dead, with forefeet pressed back, refusing to go farther. He, below his horse, looked up and pulled the reins gently, and encouraged the creature. Then the horse once more dropped his forefeet with a jerk, and the descent continued.

The Princess set off in blind, reckless pursuit, tottering and yet nimble. And Romero, looking constantly back to see how she was faring, saw her fluttering down like some queer little bird, her orange breeches twinkling like the legs of some duck, and her head, tied in the blue and buff kerchief, bound round and round like the head of some blue-topped bird. The sorrel mare rocked and slipped behind her. But down came the Princess in a reckless intensity, a tiny, vivid spot on the great hollow flank of the tawny mountain. So tiny! Tiny as a frail bird’s egg. It made Romero’s mind go blank with wonder.

But they had to get down, out of that cold and dragging wind. The spruce trees stood below, where a tiny stream emerged in stones. Away plunged Romero, zigzagging down. And away behind, up the slope, fluttered the tiny, bright-coloured Princess, holding the end of the long reins, and leading the lumbering, four-footed, sliding mare.

At last they were down. Romero sat in the sun, below the wind, beside some squaw-berry bushes. The Princess came near, the colour flaming in her cheeks, her eyes dark blue, much darker than the kerchief on her head, and glowing unnaturally.

“We make it,” said Romero.

“Yes,” said the Princess, dropping the reins and subsiding on to the grass, unable to speak, unable to think.

But, thank heaven, they were out of the wind and in the sun.

In a few minutes her consciousness and her control began to come back. She drank a little water. Romero was attending to the saddles. Then they set off again, leading the horses still a little farther down the tiny stream-bed. Then they could mount.

They rode down a bank and into a valley grove dense with aspens. Winding through the thin, crowding, pale-smooth stems, the sun shone flickering beyond them, and the disc-like aspen leaves, waving queer mechanical signals, seemed to be splashing the gold light before her eyes. She rode on in a splashing dazzle of gold.

Then they entered shadow and the dark, resinous spruce trees. The fierce boughs always wanted to sweep her off her horse. She had to twist and squirm past.

But there was a semblance of an old trail. And all at once they emerged in the sun on the edge of the spruce grove, and there was a little cabin, and the bottom of a small, naked valley with grey rock and heaps of stones, and a round pool of intense green water, dark green. The sun was just about to leave it.

Indeed, as she stood, the shadow came over the cabin and over herself; they were in the lower gloom, a twilight. Above, the heights still blazed.

It was a little hole of a cabin, near the spruce trees, with an earthen floor and an unhinged door. There was a wooden bed-bunk, three old sawn-off log-lengths to sit on as stools, and a sort of fireplace; no room for anything else. The little hole would hardly contain two people. The roof had gone—but Romero had laid on thick spruce boughs.

The strange squalor of the primitive forest pervaded the place, the squalor of animals and their droppings, the squalor of the wild. The Princess knew the peculiar repulsiveness of it. She was tired and faint.

Romero hastily got a handful of twigs, set a little fire going in the stove grate, and went out to attend to the horses. The Princess vaguely, mechanically, put sticks on the fire, in a sort of stupor, watching the blaze, stupefied and fascinated. She could not make much fire—it would set the whole cabin alight. And smoke oozed out of the dilapidated mud-and-stone chimney.

When Romero came in with the saddle-pouches and saddles, hanging the saddles on the wall, there sat the little Princess on her stump of wood in front of the dilapidated fire-grate, warming her tiny hands at the blaze, while her oranges breeches glowed almost like another fire. She was in a sort of stupor.

“You have some whisky now, or some tea? Or wait for some soup?” he asked.

She rose and looked at him with bright, dazed eyes, half comprehending; the colour glowing hectic in her cheeks.

“Some tea,” she said, “with a little whisky in it. Where’s the kettle?”

“Wait,” he said. “I’ll bring the things.”

She took her cloak from the back of her saddle, and followed him into the open. It was a deep cup of shadow. But above the sky was still shining, and the heights of the mountains were blazing with aspen like fire blazing.

Their horses were cropping the grass among the stones. Romero clambered up a heap of grey stones and began lifting away logs and rocks, till he had opened the mouth of one of the miner’s little old workings. This was his cache. He brought out bundles of blankets, pans for cooking, a little petrol camp-stove, an axe, the regular camp outfit. He seemed so quick and energetic and full of force. This quick force dismayed the Princess a little.

She took a saucepan and went down the stones to the water. It was very still and mysterious, and of a deep green colour, yet pure, transparent as glass. How cold the place was! How mysterious and fearful.

She crouched in her dark cloak by the water, rinsing the saucepan, feeling the cold heavy above her, the shadow like a vast weight upon her, bowing her down. The sun was leaving the mountain-tops, departing, leaving her under profound shadow. Soon it would crush her down completely.

Sparks? Or eyes looking at her across the water? She gazed, hypnotised. And with her sharp eyes she made out in the dusk the pale form of a bob-cat crouching by the water’s edge, pale as the stones among which it crouched, opposite. And it was watching her with cold, electric eyes of strange intentness, a sort of cold, icy wonder and fearlessness. She saw its museau pushed forward, its tufted ears pricking intensely up. It was watching her with cold, animal curiosity, something demonish and conscienceless.

She made a swift movement, spilling her water. And in a flash the creature was gone, leaping like a cat that is escaping; but strange and soft in its motion, with its little bob-tail. Rather fascinating. Yet that cold, intent, demonish watching! She shivered with cold and fear. She knew well enough the dread and repulsiveness of the wild.

Romero carried in the bundles of bedding and the camp outfit. The windowless cabin was already dark inside. He lit a lantern, and then went out again with the axe. She heard him chopping wood as she fed sticks to the fire under her water. When he came in with an armful of oak-scrub faggots, she had just thrown the tea into the water.

“Sit down,” she said, “and drink tea.”

He poured a little bootleg whisky into the enamel cups, and in the silence the two sat on the log-ends, sipping the hot liquid and coughing occasionally from the smoke.

“We burn these oak sticks,” he said. “They don’t make hardly any smoke.”

Curious and remote he was, saying nothing except what had to be said. And she, for her part, was as remote from him. They seemed far, far apart, worlds apart, now they were so near.

He unwrapped one bundle of bedding, and spread the blankets and the sheepskin in the wooden bunk.

“You lie down and rest,” he said, “and I make the supper.”

She decided to do so. Wrapping her cloak round her, she lay down in the bunk, turning her face to the wall. She could hear him preparing supper over the little petrol stove. Soon she could smell the soup he was heating; and soon she heard the hissing of fried chicken in a pan.

“You eat your supper now?” he said.

With a jerky, despairing movement, she sat up in the bunk, tossing back her hair. She felt cornered.

“Give it me here,” she said.

He handed her first the cupful of soup. She sat among the blankets, eating it slowly. She was hungry. Then he gave her an enamel plate with pieces of fried chicken and currant jelly, butter and bread. It was very good. As they ate the chicken he made the coffee. She said never a word. A certain resentment filled her. She was cornered.

When supper was over he washed the dishes, dried them, and put everything away carefully, else there would have been no room to move in the hole of a cabin. The oak-wood gave out a good bright heat.

He stood for a few moments at a loss. Then he asked her:

“You want to go to bed soon?”

“Soon,” she said. “Where are you going to sleep?”

“I make my bed here—” he pointed to the floor along the wall. “Too cold out of doors.”

“Yes,” she said. “I suppose it is.”

She sat immobile, her cheeks hot, full of conflicting thoughts. And she watched him while he folded the blankets on the floor, a sheepskin underneath. Then she went out into night.

The stars were big. Mars sat on the edge of a mountain, for all the world like the blazing eye of a crouching mountain lion. But she herself was deep, deep below in a pit of shadow. In the intense silence she seemed to hear the spruce forest crackling with electricity and cold. Strange, foreign stars floated on that unmoving water. The night was going to freeze. Over the hills came the far sobbing-singing howling of the coyotes. She wondered how the horses would be.

Shuddering a little, she turned to the cabin. Warm light showed through its chinks. She pushed at the rickety, half-opened door.

“What about the horses?” she said.

“My black, he won’t go away. And your mare will stay with him. You want to go to bed now?”

“I think I do.”

“All right. I feed the horses some oats.”

And he went out into the night.

He did not come back for some time. She was lying wrapped up tight in the bunk.

He blew out the lantern, and sat down on his bedding to take off his clothes. She lay with her back turned. And soon, in the silence, she was asleep.

She dreamed it was snowing, and the snow was falling on her through the roof, softly, softly, helplessly, and she was going to be buried alive. She was growing colder and colder, the snow was weighing down on her. The snow was going to absorb her.

She awoke with a sudden convulsion, like pain. She was really very cold; perhaps the heavy blankets had numbed her. Her heart seemed unable to beat, she felt she could not move.

With another convulsion she sat up. It was intensely dark. There was not even a spark of fire, the light wood had burned right away. She sat in thick oblivious darkness. Only through a chink she could see a star.

What did she want? Oh, what did she want? She sat in bed and rocked herself woefully. She could hear the steady breathing of the sleeping man. She was shivering with cold; her heart seemed as if it could not beat. She wanted warmth, protection, she wanted to be taken away from herself. And at the same time, perhaps more deeply than anything, she wanted to keep herself intact, intact, untouched, that no one should have any power over her, or rights to her. It was a wild necessity in her that no one, particularly no man, should have any rights or power over her, that no one and nothing should possess her.

Yet that other thing! And she was so cold, so shivering, and her heart could not beat. Oh, would not someone help her heart to beat?

She tried to speak, and could not. Then she cleared her throat.

“Romero,” she said strangely, “it is so cold.”

Where did her voice come from, and whose voice was it, in the dark?

She heard him at once sit up, and his voice, startled, with a resonance that seemed to vibrate against her, saying:

“You want me to make you warm?”

“Yes.”

As soon as he had lifted her in his arms, she wanted to scream to him not to touch her. She stiffened herself. Yet she was dumb.

And he was warm, but with a terrible animal warmth that seemed to annihilate her. He panted like an animal with desire. And she was given over to this thing.

She had never, never wanted to be given over to this. But she had WILLED that it should happen to her. And according to her will, she lay and let it happen. But she never wanted it. She never wanted to be thus assailed and handled, and mauled. She wanted to keep herself to herself.

However, she had willed it to happen, and it had happened. She panted with relief when it was over.

Yet even now she had to lie within the hard, powerful clasp of this other creature, this man. She dreaded to struggle to go away. She dreaded almost too much the icy cold of that other bunk.

“Do you want to go away from me?” asked his strange voice. Oh, if it could only have been a thousand miles away from her! Yet she had willed to have it thus close.

“No,” she said.

And she could feel a curious joy and pride surging up again in him: at her expense. Because he had got her. She felt like a victim there. And he was exulting in his power over her, his possession, his pleasure.

When dawn came, he was fast asleep. She sat up suddenly.

“I want a fire,” she said.

He opened his brown eyes wide, and smiled with a curious tender luxuriousness.

“I want you to make a fire,” she said.

He glanced at the chinks of light. His brown face hardened to the day.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll make it.”

She did her face while he dressed. She could not bear to look at him. He was so suffused with pride and luxury. She hid her face almost in despair. But feeling the cold blast of air as he opened the door, she wriggled down into the warm place where he had been. How soon the warmth ebbed, when he had gone!

He made a fire and went out, returning after a while with water.

“You stay in bed till the sun comes,” he said. “It very cold.”

“Hand me my cloak.”

She wrapped the cloak fast round her, and sat up among the blankets. The warmth was already spreading from the fire.

“I suppose we will start back as soon as we’ve had breakfast?”

He was crouching at his camp-stove making scrambled eggs. He looked up suddenly, transfixed, and his brown eyes, so soft and luxuriously widened, looked straight at her.

“You want to?” he said.

“We’d better get back as soon as possible,” she said, turning aside from his eyes.

“You want to get away from me?” he asked, repeating the question of the night in a sort of dread.

“I want to get away from here,” she said decisively. And it was true. She wanted supremely to get away, back to the world of people.

He rose slowly to his feet, holding the aluminium frying-pan.

“Don’t you like last night?” he asked.

“Not really,” she said. “Why? Do you?”

He put down the frying-pan and stood staring at the wall. She could see she had given him a cruel blow. But she did not relent. She was getting her own back. She wanted to regain possession of all herself, and in some mysterious way she felt that he possessed some part of her still.

He looked round at her slowly, his face greyish and heavy.

“You Americans,” he said, “you always want to do a man down.”

“I am not American,” she said. “I am British. And I don’t want to do any man down. I only want to go back now.”

“And what will you say about me, down there?”

“That you were very kind to me, and very good.”

He crouched down again, and went on turning the eggs. He gave her her plate, and her coffee, and sat down to his own food.

But again he seemed not to be able to swallow. He looked up at her.

“You don’t like last night?” he asked.

“Not really,” she said, though with some difficulty. “I don’t care for that kind of thing.”

A blank sort of wonder spread over his face at these words, followed immediately by a black look of anger, and then a stony, sinister despair.

“You don’t?” he said, looking her in the eyes.

“Not really,” she replied, looking back with steady hostility into his eyes.

Then a dark flame seemed to come from his face.

“I make you,” he said, as if to himself.

He rose and reached her clothes, that hung on a peg: the fine linen underwear, the orange breeches, the fleecy jumper, the blue-and-bluff kerchief; then he took up her riding-boots and her bead moccasins. Crushing everything in his arms, he opened the door. Sitting up, she saw him stride down to the dark-green pool in the frozen shadow of that deep cup of a valley. He tossed the clothing and the boots out on the pool. Ice had formed. And on the pure, dark green mirror, in the slaty shadow, the Princess saw her things lying, the white linen, the orange breeches, the black boots, the blue moccasins, a tangled heap of colour. Romero picked up rocks and heaved them out at the ice, till the surface broke and the fluttering clothing disappeared in the rattling water, while the valley echoed and shouted again with the sound.

She sat in despair among the blankets, hugging tight her pale-blue cloak. Romero strode straight back to the cabin.

“Now you stay here with me,” he said.

She was furious. Her blue eyes met his. They were like two demons watching one another. In his face, beyond a sort of unrelieved gloom, was a demonish desire for death.

He saw her looking round the cabin, scheming. He saw her eyes on his rifle. He took the gun and went out with it. Returning, he pulled out her saddle, carried it to the tarn, and threw it in. Then he fetched his own saddle, and did the same.

“Now will you go away?” he said, looking at her with a smile.

She debated within herself whether to coax him and wheedle him. But she knew he was already beyond it. She sat among her blankets in a frozen sort of despair, hard as hard ice with anger.

He did the chores, and disappeared with the gun. She got up in her blue pyjamas, huddled in her cloak, and stood in the doorway. The dark-green pool was motionless again, the stony slopes were pallid and frozen. Shadow still lay, like an after-death, deep in this valley. Always in the distance she saw the horses feeding. If she could catch one! The brilliant yellow sun was half-way down the mountain. It was nine o’clock.

All day she was alone, and she was frightened. What she was frightened of she didn’t know. Perhaps the crackling in the dark spruce wood. Perhaps just the savage, heartless wildness of the mountains. But all day she sat in the sun in the doorway of the cabin, watching, watching for hope. And all the time her bowels were cramped with fear.

She saw a dark spot that probably was a bear, roving across the pale grassy slope in the far distance, in the sun.

When, in the afternoon, she saw Romero approaching, with silent suddenness, carrying his gun and a dead deer, the cramp in her bowels relaxed, then became colder. She dreaded him with a cold dread.

“There is deer-meat,” he said, throwing the dead doe at her feet.

“You don’t want to go away from here,” he said. “This is a nice place.”

She shrank into the cabin.

“Come into the sun,” he said, following her. She looked up at him with hostile, frightened eyes.

“Come into the sun,” he repeated, taking her gently by the arm, in a powerful grasp.

She knew it was useless to rebel. Quietly he led her out, and seated himself in the doorway, holding her still by the arm.

“In the sun it is warm,” he said. “Look, this is a nice place. You are such a pretty white woman, why do you want to act mean to me? Isn’t this a nice place? Come! Come here! It is sure warm here.”

He drew her to him, and in spite of her stony resistance, he took her cloak from her, holding her in her thin blue pyjamas.

“You sure are a pretty little white woman, small and pretty,” he

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