He hadn’t been here since two operations back, before he had met Andrew. The barley had been standing in the ear then, dipping and shivering silkily under the running breeze. It was caught now, its fancies were ended. He had brought, he remembered, Herrick to read.
The sun slanted deep into the wood, making hidden birds sing softly. The touch of autumn struck from his youth that cosmic sadness, which time will tame like the bite of spring. Under the pale sun, beauty and fate and love and death ached through him. After a while he sighed, and took out his book.
He found that the sea water hadn’t soaked in beyond the notes at the back. The front cover unfortunately recalled the butcher’s order book which his mother used to keep, fastidiously, apart from the others; but though the tops of the pages were stained, they parted easily, and inside they were clean. He turned them to and fro, remembering other places where he had read them: in a punt moored to a willow by Magdalen Bridge, on a packing-case behind a Nissen hut; and the first time of all, in a sunny clearing with a stream running through it, a short way from his home. It had struck him with religious awe to find Phaedrus leading Socrates almost, it might have been, to the very spot. The spreading tree, the green bank to lean on, the water cold to the foot: nothing had been wanting, except the votive offerings and the shrine. “Give me to be beautiful within,” Socrates had prayed, “and for me let outward and inward things be reconciled together.”
Laurie turned the pages gently; they separated at the top with a crisp little sound. He found the part he was looking for and smoothed it open.
… and so it is with the followers of the other gods. Each man in his life honors, and imitates as well as he can, that god to whose choir he belonged, while he is uncorrupted in his first incarnation here; and in the fashion he has thus learned, he bears himself to his beloved as well as to the rest. So, then, each chooses from among the beautiful a love conforming to his kind; and then, as if his chosen were his god, he sets him up and robes him for worship. …
Laurie looked up at the barley; if any of the beautiful and ruthless Olympians had owned him they had lost him, he thought.
… and this striving to discover the essence of their proper god, by tracing him in themselves, is rewarded; for they are forced to look on the god without flinching, and when their memory holds him, his breath inspires them, and they share his attributes and his life, as far as man can enter godhead. And for these blessings they thank the loved one, loving him even more dearly. …
Laurie put down the book and folded his arms behind his head. He was not analytical enough yet to have discovered that there are certain loves, and certain phases of love, which bring perfect happiness only in their pauses and intervals, as water grows clear when one’s progress has ceased to stir it.
… and it fills the soul of the beloved also …
As he read on, a cock pheasant made easy by his stillness came picking within a few yards of his feet.
He is in love, therefore, but with whom he cannot say; he does not know what has become of him, he cannot tell. He sees himself in …
The pheasant, startled, burst up almost into Laurie’s face and whirred away; but he scarcely noticed it.
… he sees himself in his lover as if in a mirror, not knowing whom he sees. And when they are together, he too is released from pain, and when apart, he longs as he himself is longed for; for reflected in his heart is love’s image, which is love’s answer. But he calls it, and believes it, not love but friendship; though he too—
That book must be good,” said Andrew. “What is it?”
Laurie felt his heart jerk like a shot deer. An uncontrollable reflex, as he sat up, made him slap the book shut and lean his hand on it.
“Good Lord, Andrew,” he said breathlessly, “you made me jump half out of my skin.”
Andrew came out of the wood behind him, from the footpath he had forgotten.
“Well, I needed that to make me believe you weren’t cutting me on purpose. You looked too absorbed to be true.”
Something in his voice made Laurie look up at him. His air of ease had not come easily; he was acting; it surprised Laurie to see that he could do it so well. More, he looked tired; for the first time since he had gone on night duty there were dark smears under his eyes.
“Sit down, you’re giving me a crick in the neck.” Straining not to betray himself or to sound unwelcoming, Laurie could feel himself striking a note of appalling heartiness, like a housemaster on sports day. “What a desperate character you are, turning day into night like this. It’s only ten to three. What happened?”
“Nothing.” Andrew sat down on the grass beside him. “I felt like a walk.”
“If I’d known I’d have waited for you. How did you know where to look?”
“I asked Reg Barker, of course. I always do.”
“Do you?” He did not add that Reg had never mentioned it. “Have some blackberries.” He had picked a leafful on the way.
Andrew ate one and, turning the next one over, said, “I thought you might—I mean, if you’d rather be on your own do tell me. Honestly, I shall quite—”
The lovers of the innocent must protect them above all from the knowledge of their own cruelty. “You know I never want you to go.”
“Well, you did say that as if you meant it.”
“Thanks for the few flowers,” said Laurie, unable to prevent himself.
“You never do take me seriously, do you?”
Laurie never, perhaps, came nearer to a disastrous self-betrayal than in that moment of almost pure exasperation. It passed, and he perceived that Andrew was almost rigid with embarrassment, as people are who realize that they have let something slip out. “That was only a joke,” he added, with the fatal error of timing that destroys all credibility.
“Try sending it to the New Yorker. It’s too sophisticated for Punch.” There was a pause.
“Sorry. You were better off with a good book.”
“Andrew.” There was silence. “Look—what is the matter?”
“Nothing.” He had been staring before him, his arms around his knees; suddenly he scrambled to his feet. “I think I’ll go back to bed. I don’t seem fit to be with anyone. Thanks for putting up with me, but I don’t see why you should have to. I don’t know what’s come over me, to make me behave like this.”
“Sit down,” said Laurie. He had suppressed just in time the hopeless attempt to jump up too. Andrew sat down again: he picked a long, tough stem of grass and pulled it apart. Laurie said, “You want some sleep, that’s all.” He looked down unseeingly at the book he was still holding. “You’re not in half as filthy a mood as I always am if I miss a night.”
“Do you often?”
“Not me, I always shout for dope.”
Andrew made an irresolute movement, as if to go after all. Perhaps it’s better, Laurie thought.
“What were you reading before I interrupted you? Can I see?”
Laurie kept his hand on the book covering the title. In his imagination the pages were printed not with their own paragraphs only, but with all that he himself had brought to them: it seemed as though he must be identified and revealed in them, beyond all pretense of detachment, as if they were a diary to which he had committed every secret of his heart.
Andrew moved back looking awkward and constrained, and Laurie suddenly wondered whether he supposed it was something pornographic; after all in a free country there are very few reasons for hiding books. He tossed it over.