In silence she led him past garments lying on the floor—and Lucy usually so tidy—to draw him beside her on the bed.
Gould this gipsy be the modest and passive girl all of whose being he had thought to have discovered already? With tremulous anticipation he took off his jacket and hung it on a chair-back; then his other clothes, folding them calmly and neatly for the first time in his life, laying them on the seat of the chair the while a warm satisfaction of life spread through his being by which all thought was quelled. It was as though his blood knew what was wanted, beyond the antics of the brain, and was quickening with its own purpose. Without speaking he went to where she was lying, waving a foot in the air, and felt himself to be one with the night and the singing, and the stars beyond the window.
*
In the morning they walked upon the Romney Marsh, and he said they would go on to Folkestone on the morrow. They stayed that night at Rye, and the next at Lydd after wandering over the Denge Marsh. Then to Folkestone—where, avoiding the places he had known during and after the war, he said suddenly, “I want to go home.”
“Yes, dear, I’m quite willing. Do you mean to Speering Folliot?”
“Oh, no.”
“Well then, to Wakenham?”
He shook his head.
“Bless the boy, where then?”
“To Down Close. Perhaps the Boys are in a muddle.”
“Bother the Boys,” said Lucy. “Why can’t they look after themselves?”
“Young soldiers can’t, you know. I’ll tell you what—let’s go to Rookhurst and camp out on the meadow beside the brook until Midsummer! Then we’ll start farming, as Hilary wants us to!”
“How lovely!”
They went through the flat country of dykes and sea-walls to Dungeness, and lay about on the shingle by the coastguard station, idly listening to the piping of ring plover and the fragile breaking of summer waves on the shore.
He sat apart, watching the gentle girl playing with his son. When Billy put his arms round her neck and said “Billy’s mummy, Billy’s mummy,” he looked down at the pebbles for a few moments, before moving close, with head averted, to put his arms round them both.
Journalized: Artois—Somme, 1924–1925
Drafted: Florida, 1934
Recast and rewritten: Devon, March 1961—July 1962
By the Same Author
by Henry Williamson in Faber Finds
THE FLAX OF DREAM
The Beautiful Years
Dandelion Days
The Dream of Fair Women
The Pathway
The Wet Flanders Plain
A CHRONICLE OF ANCIENT SUNLIGHT
The Dark Lantern
Donkey Boy
How Dear Is Life
A Fox Under My Cloak
The Golden Virgin
Love and the Loveless
A Test to Destruction
The Innocent Moon
It Was the Nightingale
The Power of the Dead
The Phoenix Generation
A Solitary War
Lucifer Before Sunrise
The Gale of the World
Copyright
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by Faber and Faber Ltd
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© Henry Williamson Literary Estate, 1962
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ISBN 978–0–571–32349–4