The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen [105]
Eddie drew from his own pocket a yard of silk hand-kerchief: while he still held one corner she blew her nose on another, then diligently blotted her tears up. Like a solicitous ghost whose touch cannot be felt, Eddie, with his two forefingers, tucked her damp hair back further behind her ears. Then he gave her one sad kiss, relevant to their two eternities, not to a word that had been said now. But her fear of having assailed, injured, betrayed him was so strong that she drew back from the kiss. Her knees received from the earth a sort of chilly trembling; the walls of the thicket, shot with those light leaves, flickered beyond her eyes like woods passed in a train.
When they settled back on the grass, with about a yard between them, Eddie pulled out his twenty packet of Players. The cigarettes looked battered. "Look what you've done, too!" he said. But he lit one: threads of smoke began to swim from his nostrils; the match he blew out sputtered cold in the moss. When he had finished the cigarette he made a grave in the moss and buried the stump alive—but before this, several healing minutes had passed. "Well, darling," he said, in his natural light intonation, "you must have had Anna tell you Eddie is so neurotic."
"Is that a thing she says?"
"You ought to know: you've been with her half a year."
"I don't always listen."
"You ought to: sometimes she's so right.... Look, let's see ourselves in the distance, then we shall think, how happy they are! We're young; this is spring; this is a wood. In some sort of way or other we love each other, and our lives are before us—God pity us! Do you hear the birds?"
"I don't hear very many."
"No, there are not very many. But you must hear them—play the game my way. What do you smell?"
"Burnt moss, and all the rest of the woods."
"And what burnt the moss?"
"Oh, Eddie... your cigarette."
"Yes, my cigarette I smoked in the woods beside you—you darling girl. No no, you mustn't sigh. Look at us sitting under this old oak. Please strike me a match: I am going to smoke again, but you mustn't, you are still too young to. I have ideals, like Dickie. We don't take you into bars, and we love you to give us pious morbid thoughts. These violets ought to be in your hair—oh, Primavera, Primavera, why do they make you wear that beastly reefer coat? Give me your hand—"
"—No."
"Then look at your own hand. You and I are enough to break anyone's heart—how can we not break our own? We are as drowned in this wood as though we were in the sea. So of course we are happy: how can we not be happy? Remember this when I've caught my train tonight."
"Tonight? Oh, but I thought—"
"I've got to be in the office on time tomorrow. So what a good thing we are happy now."
"But—"
"There's not any but."
"Mrs. Heccomb will be so disappointed."
"Yes, I can't sleep in her lovely boxroom again. We shan't wake tomorrow under the same roof."
"I can't believe that you will have come and gone."
"Check up with Daphne: she will tell you for certain."
"Oh, please, Eddie, don't—"
"Why must I not? We must keep up something, you know."
"Don't say we're happy with that awful smile."
"I never mean how I'm smiling."
"Can we walk somewhere else?"
Following uphill dog paths, parting hazels, crossing thickets upright, they reached the ridge of the woods. From here, they could see out. The sun, striking down the slope of trees, glittered over the film of green-white buds: a gummy smell was drawn out in the warm afternoon haze. To the south, the chalk-blue sea, to the north, the bare smooth down: they saw, too, the gleam of the railway line. In spirit, the two of them rose to the top of life like bubbles. Eddie drew her arm through his; Portia leaned her head on his shoulder