Part 28

“She gave me herself, O Earth, O Sky; Grey sea, she is mine alone! Let the sullen boulders hear my cry, And rejoice tho’ they be but stone!

“Mine! I have won her, O good brown earth, Make merry! ‘Tis hard on Spring; Make merry; my love is doubly worth All worship your fields can bring! Let the bind that tills you feel my mirth At the early harrowing.”

“Yes, it’s the early harrowing, past a doubt,” I said, with a dread at my heart. Charlie smiled, but did not answer.

“Red cloud of the sunset, tell it abroad; I am victor. Greet me, O Sun, Dominant master and absolute lord Over the soul of one!”

“Well?” said Charlie, looking over my shoulder.

I thought it far from well, and very evil indeed, when he silently laid a photograph on the paper--the photograph of a girl with a curly head, and a foolish slack mouth.

“Isn’t it--isn’t it wonderful?” he whispered, pink to the tips of his ears, wrapped in the rosy mystery of first love. “I didn’t know; I didn’t think--it came like a thunderclap.”

“Yes. It comes like a thunderclap. Are you very happy, Charlie?”

“My God--she--she loves me!” He sat down repeating the last words to himself. I looked at the hairless face, the narrow shoulders already bowed by desk-work, and wondered when, where, and how he had loved in his past lives.

“What will your mother say?” I asked, cheerfully.

“I don’t care a damn what she says.”

At twenty the things for which one does not care a damn should, properly, be many, but one must not include mothers in the list. I told him this gently; and he described Her, even as Adam must have described to the newly named beasts the glory and tenderness and beauty of Eve. Incidentally I learned that She was a tobacconist’s assistant with a weakness for pretty dress, and had told him four or five times already that She had never been kissed by a man before.

Charlie spoke on, and on, and on; while I, separated from him by thousands of years, was considering the beginnings of things. Now I understood why the Lords of Life and Death shut the doors so carefully behind us. It is that we may not remember our first wooings. Were it not so, our world would be without inhabitants in a hundred years.

“Now, about that galley-story,” I said, still more cheerfully, in a pause in the rush of the speech.

Charlie looked up as though he had been hit. “The galley--what galley? Good heavens, don’t joke, man! This is serious! You don’t know how serious it is!”

Grish Chunder was right. Charlie had tasted the love of woman that kills remembrance, and the finest story in the world would never be written.