Love and Mr. Lewisham. H. G. Wells
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said he. “Yonder! A shed,” and they ran together. She ran laughing, and yet swiftly and lightly. He pulled her through the hedge by both hands, and released her skirt from an amorous bramble, and so they came into a little black shed in which a rusty harrow of gigantic proportions sheltered. He noted how she still kept her breath after that run.
She sat down on the harrow and hesitated. “I must take off my hat,” she said, “that rain will spot it,” and so he had a chance of admiring the sincerity of her curls—not that he had ever doubted them. She stooped over her hat, pocket-handkerchief in hand, daintily wiping off the silvery drops. He stood up at the opening of the shed and looked at the country outside through the veil of the soft vehemence of the April shower.
“There’s room for two on this harrow,” she said.
He made inarticulate sounds of refusal, and then came and sat down beside her, close beside her, so that he was almost touching her. He felt a fantastic desire to take her in his arms and kiss her, and overcame the madness by an effort. “I don’t even know your name,” he said, taking refuge from his whirling thoughts in conversation.
“Henderson,” she said.
“Miss Henderson?”
She smiled in his face—hesitated. “Yes—Miss Henderson.”
Her eyes, her atmosphere were wonderful. He had never felt quite the same sensation before, a strange excitement, almost like a faint echo of tears. He was for demanding her Christian name. For calling her “dear” and seeing what she would say. He plunged headlong into a rambling description of Bonover and how he had told a lie about her and called her Miss Smith, and so escaped this unaccountable emotional crisis. …
The whispering of the rain about them sank and died, and the sunlight struck vividly across the distant woods beyond Immering. Just then they had fallen on a silence again that was full of daring thoughts for Mr. Lewisham. He moved his arm suddenly and placed it so that it was behind her on the frame of the harrow.
“Let us go on now,” she said abruptly. “The rain has stopped.”
“That little path goes straight to Immering,” said Mr. Lewisham.
“But, four o’clock?”
He drew out his watch, and his eyebrows went up. It was already nearly a quarter past four.
“Is it past four?” she asked, and abruptly they were face to face with parting. That Lewisham had to take “duty” at half-past five seemed a thing utterly trivial. “Surely,” he said, only slowly realising what this parting meant. “But must you? I—I want to talk to you.”
“Haven’t you been talking to me?”
“It isn’t that. Besides—no.”
She stood looking at him. “I promised to be home by four,” she said. “Mrs. Frobisher has tea. …”
“We may never have a chance to see one another again.”
“Well?”
Lewisham suddenly turned very white.
“Don’t leave me,” he said, breaking a tense silence and with a sudden stress in his voice. “Don’t leave me. Stop with me yet—for a little while. … You … You can lose your way.”
“You seem to think,” she said, forcing a laugh, “that I live without eating and drinking.”
“I have wanted to talk to you so much. The first time I saw you. … At first I dared not. … I did not know you would let me talk. … And now, just as I am—happy, you are going.”
He stopped abruptly. Her eyes were downcast. “No,” she said, tracing a curve with the point of her shoe. “No. I am not going.”
Lewisham restrained an impulse to shout. “You will come to Immering?” he cried, and as they went along the narrow path through the wet grass, he began to tell her with simple frankness how he cared for her company, “I would not change this,” he said, casting about for an offer to reject, “for—anything in the world. … I shall not be back for duty. I don’t care. I don’t care what happens so long as we have this afternoon.”
“Nor I,” she said.
“Thank you for coming,” he said in an outburst of gratitude.—“Oh, thank you for coming,” and held out his hand. She took it and pressed it, and so they went on hand in hand until the village street was reached. Their high resolve to play truant at all costs had begotten a wonderful sense of fellowship. “I can’t call you Miss Henderson,” he said. “You know I can’t. You know … I must have your Christian name.”
“Ethel,” she told him.
“Ethel,” he said and looked at her, gathering courage as he did so. “Ethel,” he repeated. “It is a pretty name. But no name is quite pretty enough for you, Ethel … dear.” …
The little shop in Immering lay back behind a garden full of wallflowers, and was kept by a very fat and very cheerful little woman, who insisted on regarding them as brother and sister, and calling them both “dearie.” These points conceded she gave them an admirable tea of astonishing cheapness. Lewisham did not like the second condition very much, because it seemed to touch a little on his latest enterprise. But the tea and the bread and butter and the whort jam were like no food on earth. There were wallflowers, heavy scented, in a jug upon the table, and Ethel admired them, and when they set out again the little old lady insisted on her taking a bunch with her.
It was after they left Immering that this ramble, properly speaking, became scandalous. The sun was already a golden ball above the blue hills in the west—it turned our two young people into little figures of flame—and yet, instead of going homeward, they took the Wentworth road that plunges into the Forshaw woods. Behind them the moon, almost full, hung in the blue sky above the tree-tops, ghostly and indistinct, and slowly gathered to itself such light as the setting sun left for it in the sky.
Going out of Immering they began to talk of the future. And for the very young lover there is no future but the immediate future.
“You must write to me,” he said, and she told him she wrote such silly letters. “But I shall have reams to write to you,” he told her.
“How are you to write to me?” she asked, and they discussed a new obstacle between them. It would never do to write home—never. She was sure of that with an absolute assurance. “My mother—” she said and stopped.
That prohibition cut him, for at that time he had the makings of a voluminous letter-writer. Yet it was only what one might expect. The whole world was unpropitious—obdurate indeed. … A splendid isolation ` deux.
Perhaps she might find some place where letters might be sent to her? Yet that seemed to her deceitful.
So these two young people wandered on, full of their discovery of love, and yet so full too of the shyness of adolescence that the word “Love” never passed their lips that day. Yet as they talked on, and the kindly dusk gathered about them, their speech and their hearts came very close together. But their speech would seem so threadbare, written down in cold blood, that I must not put it here. To them it was not threadbare.
When at last they came down the long road into Whortley, the silent trees were black as ink and the moonlight made her face pallid and wonderful, and her eyes shone like stars. She still carried the blackthorn from which most of the blossoms had fallen. The fragrant wallflowers were fragrant still. And far away, softened by the distance, the Whortley band, performing publicly outside the vicarage for the first time that year, was playing with unctuous slowness a sentimental air. I don’t know if the reader remembers it that, favourite melody of the early eighties:—
“Sweet dreamland faces, passing to and fro, (pum, pum)
Bring back to Mem’ry days of long ago-o-o-oh,”