* * * * *

The third night; the third dream.

She had lost John and was looking for him; walking a long time through a country she could no longer see or remember.  She came out of blank space to the river bridge and the red town.  She could see the road switchbacking over the bridge and turning sharp and slanting up the river bank to the ramparts.

Red fortresses above the ramparts, a high red town above the fortresses, a thin red tower above the town.  The whole thing looked dangerous and unsteady, as if any minute it would topple over.  She knew John was there.  Something awful was happening to him, and he wanted her.

When she stepped on the bridge the river swelled and humped itself up to the arch.  It flooded.  The bridge walls made a channel for the gush.  It curled over the bank and came curving down the slant road from the ramparts, heavy and clear, like melted glass.

She climbed up and up through the water and round behind the fortress to the street at the top.  She could see the thin tower break and lean forward like a red crane above the houses.  She had to get to the top before the street fell down.  John was shut up in the last house.  She ran under the tower as it fell.

The house stood still, straight and tall.  John was lying in the dark room behind the closed shutters.  He wanted her.  She could hear him calling to her “Jeanne!  Jeanne!” She couldn’t see in.  She couldn’t open the door.

“Jeanne!”

The wall split off and leaned forward.

She woke suddenly to the tapping and splashing of the rain.

V

Feeding time and milking time were done; in his jutting room over the door-place John was washing and dressing for Sunday evening.  He called out to her through his window, “Go up to our seat and wait for me there.”

He had come back again, suddenly, that morning, a day before they had expected him.

Charlotte came out of the hot field into the cool room of the beech ring.  She sniffed up the clean, sharp smell of sap from the rough seat that she and John had put up there, sawing and hacking and hammering all Sunday afternoon.  Every evening when the farm work was done they would sit there together, inside the round screen of the beeches.

The farm people wouldn’t disturb them; not even Mr. Burton, now, looking in, smiling the fat, benevolent smile that blessed them, and going away; the very calves were so well used to them that they had left off pushing their noses through the tree trunks and staring.

John’s window faced her where she sat; she could see his head passing and passing across the black window space.  To her sharp, waiting soul Barrow Farm took on a sudden poignant and foreign beauty.  The house was yellow where the rain had soaked it, gold yellow like a sun-struck southern house, under the black plume of the firs, a yellow that made the sky’s blue solid and thick.  The grass, bright green after the rain, stretched with the tight smoothness of velvet over the slopes and ridges of the field.  A stripe of darker green, where their feet had trodden down the blades, led straight as a sheep’s track from the garden gate to the opening of the ring.