And he would look again
across the common, where the dark, tufted gorse was dying to seed, and
the bits of cat-heather were coming pink in tufts, like a sprinkling of
sacrificial blood.
His heart went back to the savage old spirit of the place: the desire
for old gods, old, lost passions, the passion of the cold-blooded,
darting snakes that hissed and shot away from him, the mystery of
blood-sacrifices, all the lost, intense sensations of the primeval people
of the place, whose passions seethed in the air still, from those long
days before the Romans came. The seethe of a lost, dark passion in the
air. The presence of unseen snakes.
A queer, baffled, half-wicked look came on his face. He could not
stay long at the cottage. Suddenly he must swing on to his bicycle and
go--anywhere. Anywhere, away from the place. He would stay a few days
with his mother in the old home. His mother adored him and grieved as a
mother would. But the little, baffled, half-wicked smile curled on his
face, and he swung away from his mother's solicitude as from everything
else.
Always moving on--from place to place, friend to friend: and always
swinging away from sympathy. As soon as sympathy, like a soft hand, was
reached out to touch him, away he swerved, instinctively, as a harmless
snake swerves and swerves and swerves away from an outstretched hand.
Away he must go. And periodically he went back to Winifred.
Pages:
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47