Part 9

"I'll have the start, anyway," said Peter, affectedly covering his tremors. He did not relish the idea of being second labourer to a girl who already had made him nervous.

The old man laughed in the unending way of people who enjoy one joke a day, but enjoy it well.

"You'll not get the start o' Bess," he said at last. "She's milked this half-hour, and she'll a' dug taters for a week 'fore we're sweated."

They left the house and worked silently through the first half of the morning. Peter was silent, preoccupied with his strange terror of meeting the farmer's granddaughter. Yet, as they rested at noon, he was disappointed that she had not come. He had not found content in his labour.

Then, suddenly, he saw her coming over the field with a tray. At once he felt a panic to run or to disappear. He could feel his flesh burning beneath the sweat of his morning's work. He could not look directly at the girl, but in swift glances he embraced the swing and poise of her advance.

For a miserable moment Peter stood between his terror of the girl and his instinct to run and relieve her of the heavy tray. He felt himself--it seemed after hours of indecision that he did so--spring to his feet. He met her ten yards from the spot where they had sheltered under the hedge.

"Let me," he said, taking the tray into his hands. He did not look at her, but knew she was smiling at his strange, polite way.

"The young gentleman's in a mighty hurry to know you, Bess," said the farmer, amused at Peter's incredibly gallant behaviour.

"He's a young gentleman, to be sure," said the girl in the low, even note which again stirred Peter to the bone. He felt her eyes surveying him, and in an agony of resolution looked her in the face.

He could only endure for a moment her steady, impudent gaze. Her lazy smile accented the challenge of her eyes. Peter was conscious only of her sex, and she knew it at their first meeting. In every look and motion of her face and body was provocation. Her appeal was not always conscious, but it was never silent. Peter saw now what had moved him as she stood in the light of the window the evening before with mischief in her eyes. Even then, though she had no thought of a lover, it was woman's mischief. He saw it now fronting him in the sun. He could hardly endure to meet it, yet it was vital and sweet.

They sat and talked of the work before them.

"You've come in good time, Bess. 'Twill be a storm before the week ends, and we must get the ten acre carried."

She sat calmly munching bread and cheese, waiting to catch Peter in one of his stealthy glances.

"Yes, grandpa, I've come in good time. Perhaps I knew you had a handsome young labourer."

How could she play among the messages that quickened in their eyes?

Peter angrily flushed, and she laughed. The old man chuckled, seeing nothing at all. He was not a part of their quick life.

The old man scythed steadily through the afternoon. Peter and the girl tossed the long ranks of hay, working alternate rows. He was never for a moment unaware of her presence. Starting from the extreme ends of the field, they regularly met in the centre. As the distance between them vanished, Peter became painfully excited, almost terrified. Though he seldom looked towards the girl, he somehow followed every swing of her brown arms. She invariably stopped her work as he approached, and Peter felt like a young animal whose points are numbered in the ring. He passed her three times, doggedly refusing to notice her. At the fourth encounter he shot at her a shyly resentful--almost sullen--protest. But the eyes he encountered were fixed on the strong muscles of his neck with a look--almost of greed--which staggered him. She knew he had read her, and she laughed as, in a tumult of pleasure, stung with shame, he turned swiftly away.

"Good boy," she murmured under her breath. Peter angrily turned towards her, and found her eyes, lit with mockery, openly seducing him.

"What do you mean?" said Peter foolishly.

"You're working fine, but you're not used to it."

"I'm all right."

"You're dripping with heat." She dropped her fork, and caught at her apron. It was a pretty apron, decorated with cherry-coloured ribbons.

"Come here," she said.

Peter stared at her like a fascinated rabbit. She stepped towards him, and wiped the running sweat from his face and neck. He pettishly shook himself free. Laughing, she stood back and admired him. Then, with a little shrug, she turned away and went slowly down the field. Peter watched her for a moment, troubled but hopelessly caught in the ease and grace of her swinging arms. Her face, as she came to him, had seemed as delicately cool as when first she appeared from the house, though a fine dew had glistened in the curves of her throat. She was lovely and strong; yet Peter had for her a faint, persistent horror.

He felt when evening came, and the field was mown, a glad release, curiously dashed with regret. His room had about it the atmosphere of a sanctuary. He was grateful for the peace it held, yet it was also desolate. After supper he sat at the window, watching the hills fade into a violet sky. As the light softened he heard once again a low song from the orchard. Peter's heart started like a spurred horse. The song continued--the faint crooning, as it were, of a thoughtful bird--and at last it became intolerable. Peter shut down his window and opened a book upon the table near him. It was a volume of Burton left from last evening. It fell open easily at a page; and, as Peter lifted it in the dim light, he read the title of a frank and merry tale concerning the way of a woman with a boy less willing than she. Peter suddenly dashed down the book as though he had been stung. Flouting his eyes between the leaves of this tale was a fragment of cherry-coloured ribbon.

He went from the house into the warm air, and flung himself down on the cut grass. He felt as if he were being hunted. In vain he avoided the image of the girl who had challenged him. He shut his eyes, and she again stood clearly before him in the hot sun. He buried his ears in the cool grass, and he heard her low singing. Then, in a sudden surrender, he suppressed his shy terror, and in fancy looked at her as in the flesh he had not dared to look, tracing between himself and the sky the outline of her lips and throat.

How sultry it was, and still! The air was waiting oppressively for a storm. Peter felt himself in tune with the hanging thunder. He felt he would like to hear the running water of the brook. The pearly wreck of a sunset lighted him down the hill, and soon he was sitting in a chosen nook of the river, his ears refreshed by small noises of the stream.

The silence was deep, for there was not a breath in the valley. The trees seemed to be mildly brooding--sentient sad creatures waiting for the air. Once Peter heard the bracken stir; but the silence closed again over the faint sound, leaving the world waiting as for a signal.

It seemed as if Nature was standing there bidding the earth be still till the creature she had vowed to subdue was beaten down. Peter flung his thoughts to the blank silence of the place, and they returned, reverberating and enforced.

Suddenly a shot shivered the silence into quick echoes. Peter guessed the farmer was in the warren after rabbits. Thinking to meet him and get away from the intolerable obsession of the day, he started to climb the hill. The second shot rang out surprisingly near, and almost immediately a figure rose from a bush among the bracken. It was the farmer's granddaughter. He cried out in surprise, and the figure turned.

She greeted him with an inquiring lilt of the voice. Peter came awkwardly forward.

"Did you hit?" he asked, for talking's sake.

"Two."

She leaned on the gate, hatefully smiling at him. Peter felt he must turn and run from her eyes, or that he must answer them.

He moved quickly towards her, but she did not stir. He gripped her by the arm, looked deliberately into her face, then bent and kissed her. She remained quite still, seeming merely to wait and to suffer. She neither retreated nor responded. Passion died utterly in Peter at the touch of her smiling lips. He stood away from her, brutal and chill.

"You asked me to do that," he said.

Still she smiled, betraying no sign that anything had occurred.

"You must help me to find the rabbits," she said, looking away at last towards the warren. "We're losing the light."

There was a suspicion of the fine lady in her manner, assumed to deride him. They hunted among the bracken. Peter found the dead rabbits, and they moved silently up the hill. At the garden gate they paused while he handed over his burden. Her face still kept the maddening expression of the moment when he had kissed her. But Peter's eyes now blazed back at her in wrath, and her look changed to one of slyly affected terror.

"Are you going to kiss me again?" she asked.

"Not here," Peter roughly answered. "This is where you sing. I saw you here yesterday evening."

A look of angry suspicion flashed into her eyes and passed.

"Men are very rude and sudden," she said.

"Why do you sing in the dark?"

"I sing for company," she answered.

She passed through the gate; then turned, for a moment, hesitating:

"You don't tell tales?" she abruptly asked.

"No."

"The man you saw last night," she suggested.

"I did not see him."

"He will not come again. Not yet."

"It is nothing to me," said Peter indifferently.

"Indeed?" she retorted. "I thought you asked why I sing in the dark."

Peter kept his eyes sullenly fixed on the ground, making no answer.

She shut the gate.

"Do you really want to know why I sing in the dark?"

Peter's silence covered a wish to kill this creature. There was a long silence; and when at last he looked up, her eyes were again mischievously playing him. On meeting his look of resentment and dislike, she inconsequently asked:

"Have you found a piece of cherry-coloured ribbon?"

Peter flung up his hands, and turned away into the garden. She had no need to see that he was cursing her in the shelter of the trees. She went towards the house crooning the song which was now intolerable to Peter.

XXIII

It was arranged next morning at breakfast that Peter should work in the field with the farmer, and that his granddaughter should clear the remains of last year's crop of hay from the site of the stack into the loft. Peter was grateful for this division of their work; yet, again, he was strangely disappointed. Halfway through the morning, when he had done all he could for the farmer, he sat miserably in the shadow of the hedge, fighting a blind impulse to look for the girl whose presence he detested. Surely the hot sun was burning into his brain. He went towards the house, meeting on his way the farmer's wife.

"I wonder if you'd tell Bess there's lunch waiting to be taken. I daren't leave the butter this half-hour."

"Where shall I find her?" Peter asked.

"She's in the loft, to be sure."

Peter went slowly to the yard. He seemed to be two men--one lured by the echo of a song, the other hanging upon his feet, unwilling that he should move.

The last of the stack had disappeared into the loft, wisps of hay lying in a trail from the foot of the ladder. The yard was empty.

Peter paused at the ladder's foot. Then began slowly to climb.

She was resting in a far corner, and he did not see her till he had stepped from the ladder. Then he found himself looking down at her stretched at length upon piles of sweet hay. She had fallen asleep easily as a cat, and, unconscious of her pose, was freely beautiful. Her loveliness caught at Peter. Could she but lie asleep for ever, he could for ever watch. Sleep had smoothed from her features the impudent knowledge of her power. Her beauty now lay softly upon her, held in the pure curves of her throat.

Peter leaned breathlessly towards her, filling his eyes. Had he really feared this magic? Such loveliness as this his soul had caught at in scattered dreams, and now it fronted him, and he had feared to take it. Surely he had fancied that the smile of her perfect mouth was hateful, that her eyes, so beautifully lidded, had in their pride and gluttony dismayed him.

Peter dropped softly beside her. She seemed too like a fairy to be rudely touched. He delicately brushed her lips in a kiss scarcely to be felt. She started and sat upright, alert in every fibre.

Peter saw again the creature who had troubled him. He was looking into greedy pools where her lids had seemed as curtains to hide an intolerable purity.

"You kissed me?"

"It was not you," Peter muttered.

"Funny boy! How long have you been here?"

"I have come to say that lunch is waiting."

"Peter." She sang the name in her low voice, as though she were trying the sound of it.

"You kissed me, Peter. Tell me. How do I look, asleep?"

Peter closed his eyes.

"You are beautiful."

"Even you can see that," she flashed.

Peter felt she was profaning her loveliness. He kept his eyes painfully closed. She looked at him, partly in anger, partly in contempt.

"Good boy. So very good," she murmured.

As he opened his eyes, she dropped lightly towards him. In a flash she had taken his neck between her hands, and he felt her lips and teeth upon the muscles of his neck, where her eyes had rested when first he had read them.

Then she nestled there with a little purr.

Peter broke roughly away, and she laughed.

"Good boy." She mocked him again from the ladder as she went down.

Peter waited with clenched hands till the trembling of the ladder had ceased. Then he looked into the yard. She had not yet disappeared. A young farmer had ridden into the drive, and was talking to her from his horse. She seemed to be deprecating his anger. They paused in their talk as Peter drew near them. The man was good-looking, with honest eyes. But he looked at Peter with angry suspicion, carefully searching his face, as though he desired to remember him if they should meet again.

That afternoon Peter left the farm and walked into the country. Thunder echoed among the hills, seeming the voice of his trouble. He was humiliated by the lure of a woman he disliked and feared. He vehemently told himself that he would break away. But he continually felt the strong tug of her sex. He shook under the pressure of her mouth, his neck yet bitten with that strange caress. He shunned the memory, yet returned to it, thrilling with an excitement, sweet even as it stung him.

The thunder waited among the hills all that day. As the evening wore, and Peter, back at the farm, watched the summer lightning come and go, it seemed as though batteries were closing in from all points of the heaven. But the sky was still open to the stars, and there was no rain.

Peter stood with the farmer by the garden gate. He told Peter that the little hill where they united was mysteriously immune, in a tempest, from the water which deluged the valley.

As Peter, with his thoughts full of the farmer's granddaughter, listened to the farmer's tale of a dry storm which, with never a spot of rain, had fired the stack in the yard, it seemed as though, now and then, he could hear her low singing. It floated on the heavy air. Peter could scarcely tell whether it were really her voice or an echo in his tired brain. He strained his ears, between the pauses of the farmer's talk. The low note swelled and died.

The farmer moved into the house, and Peter could more connectedly listen. Now he heard it clearly, a faint persistent singing, implacably fascinating. To find that voice was above all things to be desired.

Peter listened, faint at heart with a struggle which suddenly seemed foolish. Pleasure caught at him. He saw her beautiful, as when she slept, the low notes of her voice breathed from lips that were neither mocking nor cruel. Her hands again crept upon his throat, and he did not draw away. He needed them.

Where should he find her? Peter went like a young animal, tracking through the dark. He paused, quietly alert; as he discovered that her murmuring came from the loft where he had found her sleeping. He climbed the ladder, and stepped into the darkness. The singing stopped, and he stood still while his eyes measured the place. At last he saw her almost at his feet. He dropped beside her without a word. She did not stir, but said as softly as though she feared to frighten him away:

"So you have come to me?"

Her voice was very gentle. It was the voice of the woman who had slept.

Peter could descry her now, half sitting against the hay. He perceived only the curve of her face and neck beautifully poised above him, for he had fallen at her feet.

"I cannot see you," she said. "Are you still afraid and angry?"

She stooped over him, trying to read his face. She was very quiet. Her voice parted the still air as placidly as a dropped stone makes eddies in the water.

It seemed to offer him an endless comfort.

"I had to come to you," he whispered.

She gathered him into her arms, and kissed him as softly as he had kissed her sleeping. Peter felt as though he were sinking. As she drew her cool hands across his forehead and took his face between them, he found her tender and compelling, and he leaned upon her bosom with the waters of pleasure closing above him.

But the girl had played too long with her passion. She had met him delicately, deliberately holding back her greed, enjoying the tumult in herself and the coming delight of throwing the barriers down. She bent to kiss Peter a second time, and Peter waited for the caress of her song made visible. But, even as she stooped, there came into her eyes a lust which the darkness covered.

Suddenly the veil was torn. A vivid flash of lightning lit her, and flickered away, snatched from cloud to cloud above them. For an instant Peter saw her eyes as she stooped to him. Then darkness blotted her out, and her mouth closed down upon him.

He struggled in her arms. She did not measure the strength of his revolt, but held him fast.

"Kiss me, Peter."

The words were hot upon his cheek.

Peter put forth his whole strength, and she staggered away from him. There was a short silence. She had fallen back from the excess of his recoil. He saw her dimly rise from among the hay.

"You beast!"

The words hissed at him in the dark. Venomous anger was in her tone, and bitter contempt.

There was a silence in which their pulses could be heard. Then she spoke again.

"Why did you come to me?"

Peter could not answer. His soul was a battlefield between forces stronger than himself. She walked to the door, and Peter stared vacantly at her going. The next moment he was alone.

"Why did you come to me?"

The question beat at Peter's brain all through the dreadful night. Scarcely had he got back to his room than the storm burst from the four quarters with incredible light and clamour. But Peter's ears were deaf and his eyes were blind. He sat at his window, but heard neither the rain rushing in the valley below, nor the intolerable din in the sky above him where still the stars were clear.

Had he acted the green fool, or was he proved of a finer clay than he had allowed? He had drifted towards this girl to take her, obeying the blind motion of his blood. Then fiercely his whole being had revolted. He could not do this thing. Was his refusal a base fear of life? Had he denied his youth and the power of passion? He could not measure his deed. He now saw something fine, something consistent and strong in the girl he had refused. His own share of the story seemed only contemptible. It was even absurd. He had ineffectually played with forces beyond him.

Had he really thwarted and denied his nature? He asked it again and again. He had wanted the girl. He wanted her yet. But he could not take her with his whole soul. Therefore he could not take her at all. What was the meaning of this ugly riddle? Why was he monstrously drawn to a thing he could not do?

He denied with his whole soul that he lacked passion--the gift without which man is a creeping thing. His passion even now outplayed the lightning which forked and ran and fired the trees in the valley.

Thus Peter went wearily round his conduct of the last few hours, without advancing. Late in the night he packed to leave in the morning, and afterwards tried to sleep. But his tired brain trod the old circle of his thoughts--catching at his sleep with pale gleams of speculation, calling him into momentary consciousness, suffering him only briefly to forget.

In the morning he was flushed and uncertain. He shivered from time to time, though the storm had not lifted the summer heat. He had never felt so tired, and so utterly without strength or comfort.

XXIV

Peter, finding the farmer and his wife at breakfast, told them he was leaving, and asked that his luggage should be taken to the station. The station was two miles from the house, and Peter started to walk. He had turned into the drive, and was passing the last of the farm buildings, when he ran upon two figures vehemently talking. Their voices troubled his miserable brooding; but he was hardly yet aware of their presence before his way was barred. He looked up from the ground and was confronted with a man visibly blazing with anger.

He looked aside for an explanation, and saw that the man had been talking with the farmer's granddaughter. She was watching them with expressionless eyes, but with a cold satisfaction hiding in the line of her mouth.

"What does this mean?" said Peter, making an attempt to pass.

He looked swiftly from one to the other, recognising his opponent as the man he had seen talking from his horse in the yard yesterday.

The man struck at Peter with his whip.

Peter caught the blow on his arm, and flung out his fists.

"What's your quarrel with me?" asked Peter.

"Well you know it," said the man.

Peter turned to the farmer's granddaughter. She smiled at him, and he understood. He was filled with a desolating sense of the futility of resisting the event.

"I've no quarrel with you," he drearily protested to the man, "why do you force it?"

"It's late to talk of forcing."

"Forcing? I don't understand."

Again Peter turned to the woman. Her metallic outfacing of his question flashed the truth at him.

"He knows that you have insulted me."

The words came from her on a low malicious note.

"Are you going to fight?" the man blazed at him, flinging his weapon to the ground. "Or are you going to take that?" He pointed to the whip lying between them.

Peter flung off his coat. Standing in the sun, he felt weak and vague. He swayed a little. He felt he must get away from the intolerable heat. He looked into the shed beside them, and the man nodded.

They went in and faced each other upon a dusty floor of uneven stone. The girl sat on Peter's coat, indecently fascinated. The man looked grimly at Peter's strong arms and professional attitude. But Peter was faint and sick. He saw his fists before him as though they belonged to another--white and blurred. Dreamily he realised that a blow had started upon him out of the grey air. He met it with an instinctive guard; but he weakly smiled to feel something heavy and strong break through his arm like paper. Then everything was blotted out.

In a moment the man was kneeling beside him, astonished at the strange collapse of his opponent. Peter had gone down like a sack, striking his head on the stone floor. The man had hardly touched him. Indeed, he had himself nearly fallen with the impetus of a blow which had fallen upon the air.

He felt Peter's pulse and forehead, awed by his stillness and the stare of his eyes. The girl was now beside him.

"Quick," she said. "Run to the house. We must get him to bed."

The man looked at her, hard and stern.

"You're a bit too anxious," he said.

"Can't you see? The boy's dying."

He looked implacably into her eyes.

"Let the blackguard lie."

"Fool!"