Wild Geese Overhead (30 page)

“I hope not,” she said.

He looked at her, but she dropped her eyes, leaving the smile on her face.

Her skin was transparent as a film of amber against light. Her eyes were wide-spaced, her brows clear and firm. The sunlight warmed itself in her hair. The stillness, the calm, that was of the essence of her personality, brimmed before him. But as he looked more closely, he saw the calm invaded by a subtle tremoring. Her hand, moving about the moss, quivered ever so slightly. The smile passed, and as she looked up, giving him frankly her eyes, he saw a troubling in their depths so lovely that it was more moving than tragedy.

“We're late for lunch,” she said.

“I know.”

They made no effort to get up.

“There may be love at first sight and all that,” he said. “I don't know. What I am sure of now is that between minds searching for the same thing, there is some mysterious communication. I'll tell you about the wild geese.” And, as they sat there, he quietly told her the story.

It interested her very deeply.

“It's like a fairy-tale,” she said.

He laughed. “Not quite true! And it isn't—quite true.”

She regarded him.

“I mean, you can't make it quite true—in the telling.”

She nodded. “I have never been carried away like that, yet I know what you mean.”

“So you see that's the sort of thing you walked into,” he said.

“The city girl, with her insinuating tricks!”

“I called you that at least. You and your flowers! Spring! I scoffed at you. I never hated you. You didn't interfere with my mind enough for that. I didn't even own you in any interesting way to my mind. You had entered it and gone out of sight in it. I shrugged. Hmf! Who are you? Yet the sight of you coming down the ward.… And it was enormously complicated by the wild geese, by that queer preoccupation with light. More than that. May I tell you?”

“Please.”

He stirred restlessly. She heard the excitement in his voice as it tried to retain its ease. “There is much to tell you. You are like some one who has been a long time away. And it's the queer stuff. But it's very real, Jenny. (I love your name!) It's as real as the slums. It's more real than the slums in a way.” His fingers began plucking the grass. His words were light, like froth playing about, half-veiling, this new incredible reality of the nearness and relationship of their two solid bodies. “It's a long difficult subject and has to do with society and socialism and freedom, all the things that are going to be intensely important to the folk of our generation, things we may have to fight for.” He gave her a sidelong smile. “You see, they are making all sorts of mechanical theories about the individual, about human nature. The individual is nothing without society, we know. That is the mechanism. But the creative spirit—it is a personal thing, and I have the idea that it comes only out of love and tenderness.” He regarded the moss in his hand for a moment. “When you've been wandering through the shadows, the grim facts that seem to have no purpose, and then hit on
that
truth; when you know in yourself that it's as true as anything in science; then—you have a sudden feeling of freedom and happiness. You begin to see things in its light. But I'm not really explaining anything. I'm just talking to pass the time!”

She did not speak for a little. “There are meanings I do not quite follow. But—I'm glad you spoke like that. And—I'll understand yet.”

With a slow dawning conviction, he said: “Jenny, you will!”

She gave him a shy flash of his own humour. “You sound like one for whom life is only beginning.”

“It is,” he said. “And you?”

She could not speak. Looking at her, he was drawn into a swift movement that scattered the rabbits; but a few of them stopped to sit up; whereupon, seeing no further cause for alarm, they went on eating.