The morning after that eventful night and Demelza wakes to the - TopicsExpress



          

The morning after that eventful night and Demelza wakes to the knowledge that life will never be the same: She woke at dawn. She yawned at first not aware of the change. Then she saw that the rafters overhead ran a different way ............ The pipe and the silver snuffbox on the mantelshelf, the oval mildewed mirror above it. His bedroom. She turned and stared at the mans head with its copper-lark hair on the pillow. She lay quite still with closed eyes while her mind went over all that had happened in this room, and only her breathing coming quick and painful showed she was not asleep. The birds were waking. Another warm still day. Under the eaves the finches made liquid sounds like water dripping in a pool. She slid quietly to the edge of the bed and slipped out, afraid of waking him. At the window she stared across the outhouses to the sea. Tide was nearly full. Mist lay in a grey scarf along the line of the cliffs. The incoming waves scrawled dark furrows in the silver-grey sea.......... The damp grass was not cold to her bare feet. She walked across the garden to the stream, sat on the wooden footbridge with her back to the rail and dipped her toes in the trickle of water. The hawthorn trees growing along its banks were in bloom, but the blossom had lost its whiteness, was turning pink and falling, so that the stream was full of drifting tiny petals like the remnants of a wedding. ....... Yesterday it couldnt happen. Today it had happened. Nothing could touch that; nothing. In a few moments the sun would be up, lighting the ridge of the valley behind which a few short hours ago it had set. She drew up her legs, sat a moment on the bridge, then knelt, scooped up the water in her hands and bathed her face and neck. Then she stood up and in a sudden excess of feeling hopped and skipped across to the apple tree. A thrust and a blackbird were competing from neighbouring branches. Under the trees some leaves touched her hair, sprinkling her ear and neck with dew. She knelt and began to pick up a few of the bluebells which made a hazy carpet under the trees. But she had taken no more than a dozen when she gave it up and sat against a lichened tree, her head back, the thin juicy stems of the bluebells clutched to her breast. She sat so still, her neck curved in lassitude, her skirts drawn up, her bare legs in sensuous contact with the grass and the leaves, that a chaffinch hopped down and began its pink-pink cry beside her hand. Her throat ached to join in, but she knew she would only croak............. A rook flew low overhead, his shabby plumage gilded, his wings making a creaky sound as they beat the air. The sun rose and flooded into the valley, casting dewy silent shadows and shafts of long pale light amongst the trees. And in Nampara .................. He woke late. It was seven before he was stirring. When he got up he had a nasty taste in his mouth. It had been poor stuff a the Fighting Cocks Inn. Demelza .... Stiff old silk of the dress ...... The hooks. What had got into her? He had been drunk, but was it with liquor? The expense of spirit in a waste of shame is lust in action .... past reason hated - how did it go? He had not thought of that sonnet last night. The poets had played him false. A strange affair. At least there had been an expense of spirit .... And the whispering shrews of three villages had only anticipated the truth. Not that that mattered. What mattered was Demelza and himself. What would he find her this morning: the friendly drudge of daylight or the silk-mouthed stranger he had imagined through the summer night? She had had her way and at the last had seemed to fear it. The acme of futility was to regret a pleasure that was past, and he had no intention of doing so. The thing was done. It would change the very pith of their personal ways; it would intrude on their growing friendship, distorting every act and image and introducing false values.............. He struggled into his clothes. For a time he allowed his mind to slur over the outcome. He went down and swilled himself under the pump, glancing from time to time at the distant cliff line where Wheal Leisure could be seen............... Last night, before the final episode he had reflected that the day had begun in frustration and ended in frustration. This morning all the old restraints were rising to persuade him that the judgement still held good. Life seemed to be teaching him that the satisfaction of most appetites carried in them the seeds of frustration, that it was the common delusion of all men to imagine otherwise. The first principles of that lesson had ten-year-old roots. But then, he was not a sensualist so perhaps he couldnt judge. His father had been a sensualist and a cynic; his father took love at its face value and took it as it came. The difference was surely not so much that he was frigid by nature (far from it) but that he expected too much. The sense of separateness from others, of loneliness, had not often been so strong as this morning. He wondered if in fact there was any true content in life, if all men were as troubled as he with a sense of disillusion. .......... He put the scythe on his shoulder and tramped over to the hayfield, which lay on the northeast side of the valley beyond the apple trees and stretching up to Wheal Grace. A large field unenclosed by walls or hedges, and the hay in it was a good crop, better than last year, yellowed and dried by the last week of sun. He took off his coat and hung it over a stone at the corner of the field. He was bare-headed and could feel the warmth of the climbing sun on his hair and open neck. Natural enough that in the old days men were sun worshippers; especially in England, where the sun was elusive and fitful and always welcome, in a land of mists and cloud and drifting rain. He began to cut, bent a little forward and using the body as a pivot, swinging in a wide semi-circle. The grass toppled reluctantly, long sheafs of it bending over and sinking slowly to the earth. With the grass went patches of purple scabious and moon daisies, chervil and yellow buttercups, flowering illicitly and suffering the common fate. back at Nampara, he finds he has a visitor ... Elizabeth: There was a footstep in the hall and Demelza came in carrying a great sheaf of fresh-picked bluebells. She stopped dead when she saw she was intruding. She was in a plain blue linen dress, homemade, with open neck and a bit of embroidery to ornament the belt. She looked wild and unkempt, for all afternoon, shamefully neglecting Prudie and the turnips, she had been out lying in the grass of another hayfield on the high ground to the west of the house, staring down at Ross and the men working on the hill opposite. She had lain there sniffing at the earth and peering through the grass like a young dog, and finally had turned over and gone to sleep in the sweet warmth of the declining sun. Her hair was ruffled and there was grass and burrs on her frock. She returned Rosss gaze and glanced with wide eyes at Elizabeth. Then she muttered an apology and turned to withdraw. This is Demelza of whom youve heard me speak, Ross said. This is Mistress Elizabeth Poldark. Two women, he thought. Made of the same substance? Earthenware and porcelain. Elizabeth thought: Oh God, so there is something between them. Demelza thought: Shes one day too late, just one day. How beautiful she is; how I hate her. Then she glanced at Ross again, and for the first time like the stab of a treacherous knife it occurred to her that Rosss desire for her last night was a flicker of empty passion. All day she had been too preoccupied with her own feelings to spare time for his. Now she could see so much in his eyes. I must go. ..... What pretty bluebells youve picked. Would you like them? said Demelza. You can have em if youd like........ Goodbye, he said. It was their first complete reconciliation since his return; and they were both aware, while not knowing that the other was aware, that the reconciliation had come just too late to count for what it might. He watched her ride away slowly up the valley. Once he saw the glint of her hair as it caught the light from the slanting sun. In this shadowed valley the birds were breaking out into the evening song. He was tired, so tired, and wanted to rest. But his peace of mind, hardly bought during the day, was dissipated with her visit....... For some minutes he busied himself with the small tasks of the farm; these done he came back into the house and to the living room. Demelza was still there, standing by the window. She held the bluebells in her arms. He did not seem to notice her, but went slowly across to his favourite chair, took off his coat and sat for some time staring with a little frown at the opposite wall. Presently he leaned back. Im tired, he said. She turned from the window and moving quietly, as if he were asleep, she came towards his chair. On the rug at his feet she sat down. She began idly, but half contentedly, to arrange and re-arrange the bluebells in heaps upon the floor.
Posted on: Sat, 22 Nov 2014 23:49:51 +0000

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