And he too waited in the magical steadfastness of suspense, for her to
take this knowledge of him as he had taken it of her. He knew her
darkly, with the fullness of dark knowledge. Now she would know him,
and he too would be liberated. He would be night-free, like an
Egyptian, steadfast in perfectly suspended equilibrium, pure mystic
nodality of physical being. They would give each other this
star-equilibrium which alone is freedom.
She saw that they were running among trees--great old trees with dying
bracken undergrowth. The palish, gnarled trunks showed ghostly, and
like old priests in the hovering distance, the fern rose magical and
mysterious. It was a night all darkness, with low cloud. The motor-car
advanced slowly.
'Where are we?' she whispered.
'In Sherwood Forest.' It was evident he knew the place. He drove softly, watching. Then they
came to a green road between the trees. They turned cautiously round,
and were advancing between the oaks of the forest, down a green lane.
The green lane widened into a little circle of grass, where there was a
small trickle of water at the bottom of a sloping bank. The car
stopped.
'We will stay here,' he said, 'and put out the lights.' He extinguished the lamps at once, and it was pure night, with shadows
of trees like realities of other, nightly being. He threw a rug on to
the bracken, and they sat in stillness and mindless silence. There were
faint sounds from the wood, but no disturbance, no possible
disturbance, the world was under a strange ban, a new mystery had
supervened. They threw off their clothes, and he gathered her to him,
and found her, found the pure lambent reality of her forever invisible
flesh. Quenched, inhuman, his fingers upon her unrevealed nudity were
the fingers of silence upon silence, the body of mysterious night upon
the body of mysterious night, the night masculine and feminine, never
to be seen with the eye, or known with the mind, only known as a
palpable revelation of living otherness.
She had her desire of him, she touched, she received the maximum of
unspeakable communication in touch, dark, subtle, positively silent, a
magnificent gift and give again, a perfect acceptance and yielding, a
mystery, the reality of that which can never be known, vital, sensual
reality that can never be transmuted into mind content, but remains
outside, living body of darkness and silence and subtlety, the mystic
body of reality. She had her desire fulfilled. He had his desire
fulfilled. For she was to him what he was to her, the immemorial
magnificence of mystic, palpable, real otherness.