So strong was the life in her as she walked onwards in the tossing April weather, that she could afford to be prodigal of herself even to the extent of throwing a greeting to Andy Macpherson, who was walking, also alone, on the uplands. So might Artemis, of her condescension, have graced a mortal with a word. But Andy knew only one way of talking to a girl, and be sure, given the opportunity so long denied, made use of it: whereupon Artemis, who had amassed a very considerable vocabulary during her researches in history and literature, and in her new-found arrogance of spirit discovered she could use it, chid him with such hot scorn and vehement indignation (after making the first advances too!) that Andy’s blandness frothed to bluster and his bluster collapsed like a paper bag at a Sunday school picnic; while Martha marched ahead with her chin a little higher and her shoulders more squarely set. O, cruel! − But these goddesses are notoriously unfeeling, up yonder on their Olympian crags. When Artemis takes to the heather, ware to the soap-selling, bacon-slicing helot who would follow.
Artemis was very happy on the heather. She swung up through Crannochie, hailing Aunt Josephine as she went; and on to the Rotten Moss, where she clambered upon the boulders and plunged among the heather-tufts; and like a votary of the fleet-foot goddess (for to goddess her were hardly fair and she so near the discovery of her humanity), ran races with her own swift thought; and wind-blown, mazed with distance, drunken with height and space, danced fiercely under a bare sky. Diana would have trembled, could she have seen her votary. Such wild abandon was hardly virginal.
May was a frail blue radiance. Was there ever such a summer? Day after day the sun rose softly and night after night sank in a shimmering haze. The hills trembled, so liquid a blue that they seemed at point of dissolution; and clouds like silver thistle-down floated and hovered above them. Stifling one night in the low-roofed bedroom, where Madge’s cheap scents befouled the air, Martha rose exasperated and carried her shoddy bed outside. There she watched till morning the changes of the sky and saw the familiar line of hills grow strange in the dusky pallor of a summer midnight. Thereafter she made the field her cubicle and in its privacy she spent her nights. She did not sleep profoundly, but her vitality was too radiant to suffer from the privation. Sometimes the rain surprised her and she was compelled to shelter; sometimes she let it fall on her, soft unhurrying rain that refreshed like sleep itself; sometimes she awoke, dry and warm, to a cool wet world where every grass, each hair on the uncovered portions of her blanket, each hair about her own forehead, hung with its own wet drops. But oftener the nights were clear, marvellously lit. Darkness was a pale lustrous gloom. Sometimes the north was silver-clear, so luminous that through the filigree of leaf and sapling its glow pierced burning, as though the light were a patterned loveliness standing out against the background of the trees. Later the glow dulled and the trees became the pattern against the background of the light. The hushed world took her in. Tranquil, surrendered, she became one with the vast quiet night. A puddock sprawled noiselessly towards her, a bat swooped, tracing gigantic patterns upon the sky, a corncrake skraighed, on and on through the night, monotonous and forgotten as one forgets the monotony of the sea’s roar; and when the soft wind was in the south-west, the sound of the river, running among its stony rapids below the ferry, floated up and over her like a tide. She fell asleep to its running and wakened to listen for it; and heard it as one hears the breathing of another.
In the third week of June Luke said: ‘We deserve a change − we’re positively grey with dust.’
The hot air quivered above the bogs. There was no wind to blow the cotton-grass. An insubstantial world, hazed upon its edges, unstable where the hot air shook. Midsummer: at their feet the sweet pink orchises, the waxen pale cat-heather, butterwort: the drone and shimmer of dragon-flies around them: and everywhere the call of water.
They were drowsed with happiness. Sometimes they walked, sometimes they stood and gazed, sometimes they lay in the long brown heather, smelling the bog-myrtle, listening to the many voices of the burns. A butterfly − a tiny blue − glided over and over them. It floated on the current of their happiness.
At twilight long shadows came out upon the hills. Their darknesses were tender purple, and stars, too soft to shine, hung few and single above. The skies were dust-of-gold.
There were no stars too soft, no purple too tender, no dust-of-gold too paradisal, for their mood.
Tomorrow − the trance will break.
Martha tossed the bedclothes off and sat up in bed. She was in the house, in the low hot room with Madge and her reek of face powder. She had been too weary, coming home from the afternoon among the hills, to carry her bed outside. They had gone, the three of them, in an excursion train, up-country among the Saturday trippers, and back at night in a crowded compartment where sleepy children squabbled and smeared the windows with their sticky hands.
It was long past midnight when she abandoned the effort to sleep and sat up. She was not weary now, but through her body there ran a tantalizing irritation. She thought: ‘It isn’t pain − but what is it? It’s in me. It hurts my body.’ And she writhed, twisting herself upon the bed. ‘I want the eleven stars,’ she thought. ‘But are they enough?’ Her wants felt inordinate and she too small and weak. She battled against a sense of impotence.
She moved again, tossing an arm, and her hands met and clenched. She was so sunk in her absorption that for a moment she did not realize it was her own hand she had closed upon. She felt the firm impact of the grip … oh, it was her own! Queer, her own hand there. And then, with the suddenness of light when a match is struck, she knew what it was she wanted. Luke’s hand, just to touch his hand: that would allay the agony that tore her, the pain that gnawed and could not be located, that was in all her body and yet nowhere.
She knew now. She wanted Luke. All of him, and to be her own. And the torrent of her passion, sweeping headlong, bore her on in imagination past every obstacle between her and her desire. The thought of Dussie was like a straw tumbled in a cataract. Let the whole world be swamped and broken in this cataract, so it carry her to her goal. The Ironside in her blood was up. Like her father who had swept the proud Leggatt beauty on to marriage, masterful until he had his will; like her Aunt Sally who had defied opinion and eloped with the man who roused her passion; Martha was ready to spurn the whole world and herself as well, in the savage imperious urge of her desire. Leggatt respectability! − She wanted Luke with an animal Ironside ardour. And was he not already half in love with her? − or more than half. ‘I could make him love me,’ she thought; and the sense of her own power rushed over her with a wild black sweetness she could not resist.
A curious part to be cast for a Beatrice. Martha was going out of her rôle. But in truth she was neither Beatrice, nor Artemis, but Martha Ironside, a woman: of like dimensions, senses, affections, passions, with other women. If you prick her, will she not bleed? And if you wrong her −
But it was a little later till Martha began to consider whether she had not been wronged.
Morning came at last, and she could rise without exciting comment.
The day was Sunday. Impossible to see Luke that day. She passed the time in restless walking, and had one thought only: ‘I can make him love me.’ She had never had a strong sense of the complex social inter-relationships of life: now it was gone completely.
At night she slept in the field. Slept! − Sleep was past imagining. There was no darkness; and the diffusion of light was strange and troubling. In the very early hours of morning she slipped from bed, put on her clothes, and went to the wood.
There the light was stranger still. The wood was bathed in it; a wood from another world; as though someone had enclosed it long ago in a volatile spirit, through which as through a subtly altering medium one saw its boughs and boles. She was almost afraid to enter in; and when, ahead through the glimmering gloom, she had a swift glimpse of fire, as though a match