She would sift the generations of men through her sieve,and see if she couldn't find one who would do.--'Go ye into the streets and by ways of Jerusalem,and see if you can find a man .'It had been impossible to find a man in the Jerusalem of the prophet,though there were thousands of male humans.But a man!C'est une autre chose !
She had an idea that he would have to be a foreigner:not an Englishman,still less an Irishman.A real foreigner.
But wait!wait!Next winter she would get Clifford to London;the following winter she would get him abroad to the South of France,Italy.Wait!She was in no hurry about the child.That was her own private affair,and the one point on which,in her own queer,female way,she was serious to the bottom of her soul.She was not going to risk any chance comer,not she!
One might take a lover almost at any moment,but a man who should beget a child on one...wait!wait!it's a very different matter.--'Go ye into the streets and byways of Jerusalem...'It was not a question of love;it was a question of a man.Why,one might even rather hate him,personally.Yet if he was the man,what would one's personal hate matter?
This business concerned another part of oneself.
It had rained as usual,and the paths were too sodden for Clifford's chair,but Connie would go out.She went out alone every day now,mostly in the wood,where she was really alone.She saw nobody there.
This day,however,Clifford wanted to send a message to the keeper,and as the boy was laid up with influenza,somebody always seemed to have influenza at Wragby,Connie said she would call at the cottage.
The air was soft and dead,as if all the world were slowly dying.Grey and clammy and silent,even from the shuffling of the collieries,for the pits were working short time,and today they were stopped altogether.The end of all things!
In the wood all was utterly inert and motionless,only great drops fell from the bare boughs,with a hollow little crash.For the rest,among the old trees was depth within depth of grey,hopeless inertia,silence,nothingness.
Connie walked dimly on.From the old wood came an ancient melancholy,somehow soothing to her,better than the harsh insentience of the outer world.She liked the inwardness of the remnant of forest,the unspeaking reticence of the old trees.They seemed a very power of silence,and yet a vital presence.They,too,were waiting:obstinately,stoically waiting,and giving off a potency of silence.Perhaps they were only waiting for the end;to be cut down,cleared away,the end of the forest,for them the end of all things.But perhaps their strong and aristocratic silence,the silence of strong trees,meant something else.
As she came out of the wood on the north side,the keeper's cottage,a rather dark,brown stone cottage,with gables and a handsome chimney,looked uninhabited,it was so silent and alone.But a thread of smoke rose from the chimney,and the little railed-in garden in the front of the house was dug and kept very tidy.The door was shut.
Now she was here she felt a little shy of the man,with his curious far-seeing eyes.She did not like bringing him orders,and felt like going away again.She knocked softly,no one came.She knocked again,but still not loudly.There was no answer.She peeped through the window,and saw the dark little room,with its almost sinister privacy,not wanting to be invaded.
She stood and listened,and it seemed to her she heard sounds from the back of the cottage.Having failed to make herself heard,her mettle was roused,she would not be defeated.
So she went round the side of the house.At the back of the cottage the land rose steeply,so the back yard was sunken,and enclosed by a low stone wall.She turned the corner of the house and stopped.In the little yard two paces beyond her,the man was washing himself,utterly unaware.
He was naked to the hips,his velveteen breeches slipping down over his slender loins.And his white slim back was curved over a big bowl of soapy water,in which he ducked his head,shaking his head with a queer,quick little motion,lifting his slender white arms,and pressing the soapy water from his ears,quick,subtle as a weasel playing with water,and utterly alone.Connie backed away round the corner of the house,and hurried away to the wood.In spite of herself,she had had a shock.After all,merely a man washing himself,commonplace enough,Heaven knows!
Yet in some curious way it was a visionary experience:it had hit her in the middle of the body.She saw the clumsy breeches slipping down over the pure,delicate,white loins,the bones showing a little,and the sense of aloneness,of a creature purely alone,overwhelmed her.Perfect,white,solitary nudity of a creature that lives alone,and inwardly alone.And beyond that,a certain beauty of a pure creature.Not the stuff of beauty,not even the body of beauty,but a lambency,the warm,white flame of a single life,revealing itself in contours that one might touch:a body!