chatter of the little bright
trout-stream, the dazzle of the buttercups, the rocks of the old "wild
men"; the calling of the cuckoos and yaffles, the hooting of the owls;
and the red moon peeping out of the velvet dark at the living whiteness
of the blossom; and her face just out of reach at the window, lost in its
love-look; and her heart against his, her lips answering his, under the
apple tree--all this besieged him. Yet he lay inert. What was it which
struggled against pity and this feverish longing, and kept him there
paralysed in the warm sand? Three flaxen heads--a fair face with friendly
blue--grey eyes, a slim hand pressing his, a quick voice speaking his
name--"So you do believe in being good?" Yes, and a sort of atmosphere
as of some old walled-in English garden, with pinks, and cornflowers, and
roses, and scents of lavender and lilaccool and fair, untouched, almost
holy--all that he had been brought up to feel was clean and good. And
suddenly he thought: 'She might come along the front again and see me!'
and he got up and made his way to the rock at the far end of the beach.
There, with the spray biting into his face, he could think more coolly.
To go back to the farm and love Megan out in the woods, among the rocks,
with everything around wild and fitting--that, he knew, was impossible,
utterly. To transplant her to a great town, to keep, in some little flat
or rooms, one who belonged so wholly to Nature--the poet in him shrank
from it. His passion would be a mere sensuous revel, soon gone; in
London, her very simplicity, her lack of all intellectual quality, would
make her his secret plaything--nothing else. The longer he sat on the
rock, with his feet dangling over a greenish pool from which the sea was
ebbing, the more clearly he saw this; but it was as if her arms and all
of her were slipping slowly, slowly down from him, into the pool, to be
carried away out to sea; and her face looking up, her lost face with
beseeching eyes, and dark, wet hair-possessed, haunted, tortured him! He
got up at last, scaled the low rock-cliff, and made his way down into a
sheltered cove. Perhaps in the sea he could get back his control--lose
this fever! And stripping off his clothes, he swam out. He wanted to
tire himself so that nothing mattered and swam recklessly, fast and far;
then suddenly, for no reason, felt afraid. Suppose he could not reach
shore again--suppose the current set him out--or he got cramp,