So they were together in a darkness, passionate, electric,
for ever haunting the back of the common day, never in the
light. In the light, he seemed to sleep, unknowing. Only she
knew him when the darkness set him free, and he could see with
his gold-glowing eyes his intention and his desires in the dark.
Then she was in a spell, then she answered his harsh,
penetrating call with a soft leap of her soul, the darkness woke
up, electric, bristling with an unknown, overwhelming
insinuation.
By now they knew each other; she was the daytime, the
daylight, he was the shadow, put aside, but in the darkness
potent with an overwhelming voluptuousness.
She learned not to dread and to hate him, but to fill herself
with him, to give herself to his black, sensual power, that was
hidden all the daytime. And the curious rolling of the eyes, as
if she were lapsing in a trance away from her ordinary
consciousness became habitual with her, when something
threatened and opposed her in life, the conscious life.
So they remained as separate in the light, and in the thick
darkness, married. He supported her daytime authority, kept it
inviolable at last. And she, in all the darkness, belonged to
him, to his close, insinuating, hypnotic familiarity.
All his daytime activity, all his public life, was a kind of
sleep. She wanted to be free, to belong to the day. And he ran
avoiding the day in work. After tea, he went to the shed to his
carpentry or his woodcarving. He was restoring the patched,
degraded pulpit to its original form.
But he loved to have the child near him, playing by his feet.
She was a piece of light that really belonged to him, that
played within his darkness. He left the shed door on the latch.
And when, with his second sense of another presence, he knew she
was coming, he was satisfied, he was at rest. When he was alone
with her, he did not want to take notice, to talk. He wanted to
live unthinking, with her presence flickering upon him.
He always went in silence. The child would push open the shed
door, and see him working by lamplight, his sleeves rolled back.
His clothes hung about him, carelessly, like mere wrapping.
Inside, his body was concentrated with a flexible, charged power
all of its own, isolated. From when she was a tiny child Ursula
could remember his forearm, with its fine black hairs and its
electric flexibility, working at the bench through swift,
unnoticeable movements, always ambushed in a sort of
silence.
She hung a moment in the door of the shed, waiting for him to
notice her. He turned, his black, curved eyebrows arching
slightly.
"Hullo, Twittermiss!"
And he closed the door behind her. Then the child was happy
in the shed that smelled of sweet wood and resounded to the
noise of the plane or the hammer or the saw, yet was charged
with the silence of the worker. She played on, intent and
absorbed, among the shavings and the little nogs of wood. She
never touched him: his feet and legs were near, she did not
approach them.