Elizabeth Bowen - 3rd Excerpt from The Last September lyrics

As Lois ran down from the garden, swollen about the personality with annoyance, she saw Gerald waiting at a turn of the path, by a holly tree. He intently watched her advance; without comprehension, as though she had been a picture. Though they were alone, he did not put out a hand or move towards her. He stood there with the vigour, grief and indifference of a tree that cannot help growing. “Gerald?” “What's the matter?” he said, impa**ive. “Oh, Laurence walked on a snail!” “Bad luck!” “My dear, he liked it.” “Queer,” said Gerald, finding the word with difficulty. “Where shall we go?” she asked, while something in her stopped like a clock with foreboding. The encounter, uncoloured by surprise or pa**ion, left her quite at a loss. Unkissed, her mouth and cheeks felt a touch of ice. “It seems now,” said Gerald impersonally, as though delivering a message, “that we can't ever be married.” “Why? When?” she cried angrily. Gerald looked at her under level eyelids. She remembered saying: “I wish you wouldn't keep looking so pleased the whole time.” Now his look and silence were cold with a doomed expectancy: she nearly hated him. Dumbly, in happy-seeming physical agreement like a pair of animals, they wheeled off down the path together, crossed the yard rapidly and came into the plantation ribbed with shadow and lanced across with light about the eye-level. He told her her aunt agreed he was not good enough; it would never do at all, her aunt had said. Looking angrily up the tree-trunks, she exclaimed that her aunt was mad. She repeated this with vehemence and confusion, pulling at her fingers. He listened to her in silence, wounded, wounded. She wished they had not come down—overruling, possibly, in each other some desire for space—to the plantation where constricted by firs, thought and movement were difficult and upright shadows emphasised his severity. “She advised me,” Gerald concluded, “to have a frank talk with you.” “Is this the frank talk now?” “She was certain you didn't love me.” “Gerald—why weren't you furious?” “I … I don't know,” he said, surprised by the question. She saw him standing confused, like a foreigner with whom by some failure in her vocabulary all communication was interrupted. Her mind halted and she wanted to run away. “Gerald, come back. I'm wretched. Why do we have to talk?” “I thought you liked that …” Then outside himself with pa**ion, he cried: “I'd rather be dead than not understand.” “But don't you know I … ? Gerald?” If he did not know, it would be quite over. She watched with agony what seemed to be his indifference. They were each waiting for the other. He watched her hand, on a tree-trunk, pick like a bird at the scaly bark. Her hand, which immediately centred her consciousness of him, paused and became quite rigid, fingers spread out. When he saw her hand so quiet, he would have to be certain. And he immediately said with his usual little resigned inflection: “You see, you are everything.” “I know,” she said, impersonal. “I suppose you are what I mean by life … Do you understand at all?” “You sometimes make me.” She wanted to add: “Touch me now”: it was the only way across. In her impotence, her desolation—among the severe trees—at not being compelled, she made a beseeching movement which he—remote in a rather sublime perplexity that transcended pain—either ignored or rejected. From the stables, the six o'clock bell sent out relief in a jerky, metallic pa**age of sound through the plantation. She wanted something to look at, to follow: a train curving past in a rush. With an exaggerated movement, she put up her hands to her ears. Gerald's face, in a band of light, remained impa**ible. “Gerald, you're making us lose each other!” she shouted above the bell. “But I mean to say: what would you lose?” “Everything.” “Do you mean that?” A light ran almost visibly up inside him. She saw now where they were, why he had come today. She thought of going, hesitating with delight, to the edge of an unknown high-up terrace, of Marda, of getting into a train. “No,” she cried, terrified, “why should I?” “Then we don't mean the same thing.” “Why don't you make me … something?” “I thought I could. I know I can—when I'm not with you.” “Damn, damn,” said Lois. “I do want you!” Gerald said piteously: “Then why can't it all be simple?” “But it's our being so young,” she said, too eagerly, “and then, money. I mean, we have got to be practical.” He explained to her, wide-eyed: “It isn't anything practical that makes this—like d**h. What she said was, that if you loved me …” “It's like a nightmare that even you should begin to talk. I thought you were a rock: I was safe with you. Gerald, really, this is all like a net; little twists of conversation knotted together. One can't move, one doesn't know where one is. I really can't live at all if it has all got to be arranged. I tell you: even what I think isn't my own, and Mrs. Montmorency comes bursting into my room at nights. Even Marda—nothing we said to each other mattered, it hasn't stayed, she goes off to get married in a mechanical sort of way. She thinks herself so damned funny—it's cheap, really. All that matters is what you believe—Gerald you'll k** me, just standing there. You don't know what it's like for a snail, being walked on… .” “I don't understand you,” he cried in agony. “Who is a snail?” “I didn't ask you to understand me: I was so happy. I was so safe.” Gerald noticed a change somewhere; the light was gone from his face, moving down the trees it had disappeared. He looked at his wrist-watch. They had been a short time together, only twenty minutes. “When were you happy?” he said accurately. He would have liked to be sure of this, and of several other matters: she was not collected enough to explain. He eyed the incredible wood, the path, her unchanged figure in the cheerful blue woollen dress. Something struggled free in his brain and said, quite apart from his numbed self: “My darling, don't, don't rack yourself. You know this will be always the same for me. Whatever's impossible, you will always be perfect. I know we're different about things: if that didn't hurt you it would never matter to me. I mean, don't let's be disappointed. You know I'm not giving you up: I could never have done that. But it's just that, you see, you never … I suppose things can't come out what one wants … I suppose it would hardly do. …” “But, Gerald, where are we?” He said: “Don't worry.” They were both, he knew, entirely lost. “But what have I done? What have I not done?” After a minute, during which she heard him finger his belt—his fingers slipped on the leather—she shut her eyes and said, “So you're certain I don't love you?” No answer. “Oh, leave that belt alone, Gerald!” Still no answer, as though he were asleep. And indeed he felt, as at the approach of sleep, an immense indifference. She, tortured by the loneliness of insomnia, had to cry out: “Won't you even just try— won't you just kiss me?” “I don't think …” “All right.” “Look, I must go now.” Vaguely, he saluted and began to go up the path, towards the beech walk, towards the house. “Goodbye?” she said. He only half paused. “No, don't let's …” “Where did you leave your bicycle?” He was well up the path; he called back. “Against the hedge. You know, under the tennis courts.” She knew; she remembered him pulling leaves from the privet hedge, scattering them on the gra** and throwing them over her. She remembered that Mrs. Boatley was a Christian Scientist. It was a good thing summer was practically over; there might not be more tennis parties. But at this the incomprehensible glare of summer blinded her, bringing tears to her eyes. “Gerald!” she called. But by this time he seemed to be out of earshot.