‘I can’t bear it,’ she said again and put her arms round him, her head against his chest beseeching him in that muted voice of hers to hold her.
At once his arms went round her and he was about to say something but it was as if she discerned his intention as soon as it was conceived and begged him: ‘Please, do not speak. Please don’t say anything. Just hold me like this. It is wiser than any words you or I could find.’
As she spoke the distant rumble of thunder from the lightning which had greeted their entry into her room broke over their heads like a wave finding the shore. Never, Lawrence said, had he heard so commanding and holy a sound, as if it were the authentic voice of life itself exhorting them to obey. More wonderful still as he stood there holding this strange woman to him she ceased to be a stranger and separate from him.
He was utterly taken aback therefore when suddenly a small low voice breaking the rule it had just made said: ‘I expect you will despise me for this.’
He thanked heaven he was not taken aback for too long, and quickly interpreted the question to be her way of banishing a final fear and so making that sense of oneness between them complete. Up to that moment he had not had time really to think about what was happening, and in the end he was grateful for the question because of the light it shed on the turmoil on his own feelings. It made him realize that from the start the impression she had made on him was that of a singularly true person. The little she had said to him had been enough to reveal an essentially feminine sensibility and intelligence. She had courage too, in the way only that women have courage, and now in this deep concern for life which had made her turn to him she had not shirked a most unorthodox challenge to the special integrity of her sex. Somehow he had taken it for granted that all these feelings that were so strong within him would have been common knowledge between them, and that was his only reason for being taken aback.
Touched by her concern for her honour, in his imagination he would have liked to tell her that he could kneel down before her as a sign of how he respected her and beg her forgiveness for what men had taken so blindly and wilfully from women all the thousand and one years now vanishing so swiftly behind them. But all he hastened to say was: ‘I would have to be a poet and not a soldier to tell you all that I think and feel about you. . . . I can only say that you are all I imagined a good woman to be. . . . You make me feel inadequate and very humble. . . . Please know that I understand you have turned to me not for yourself, not for me, but on behalf of life. When all reason and the world together seem to proclaim the end of life as we have known it, I know you are asking me to renew with you our pact of faith with life in the only way possible to us.’
That, almost word for word, Lawrence told us, was what he had said to her, and we could judge for ourselves how inadequate it was. But it was the best he could do. The hell of it was that he longed for the ability to express the many complex emotions he had about her in a simple and intelligible way, but all he seemed able to do was to put into rough words only the simplest and most arbitrary of his feelings.
Then the suspicion that as he spoke she had started to cry alarmed him. He put his hand to her face and felt the tears on her cheeks.
‘Forgive me,’ he exclaimed, ‘for hurting you. But if only you could see inside me you – you would be blinded by the vision I have of you.’
‘I’ve told you before there are all kinds of tears.’ Her voice was overflowing with a new tenderness. ‘You’ve not hurt me. I’m only crying because I am overwhelmed by my good luck, first in finding you here and then in finding such understanding in you.’
She raised herself, clasped her arms round him and kissed him with great tenderness.
Life, Lawrence said, can have no more than a passing regard for the conventions which men create as preliminaries for these occasions. But in the deep of itself life is profoundly traditional and when all else breaks down it has its own inner pattern of ceremonial of heart and mind to take over so as to confirm, solemnize, bless, dedicate and make whole what happened then between them. From that moment the night became peculiarly their own. He had, he hoped, told us enough about the nature of that island to show how eventful it was. He had never before experienced a nature in the physical world so packed as was that island with events of fire and earthquake, of upsurge of plants and volcanoes, of cloud, thunder, lightning and rain in the sky, and of the unending music of the small first things of life, celebrating with scraping legs, beating wings, and brilliant little voices the various urges of creation minutely entrusted to each of them. Yet that night was even more eventful than any crowded moment he had yet lived through, and each event within it seemed designed to bless and make the two of them more meaningful in each other’s arms. There were times when they were both so stirred by their nearness to each other and to all other living, singing, flashing and shining creatures that they made love close to tears, until finally, utterly resolved they fell into sleep as if they had all life before them.
On the verge of sleep the girl suddenly asked: ‘What’s your name? I know your surname is Lawrence. But your own, your Christian name?’
‘John,’ he replied gently stroking her cheek with the side of a finger: ‘John.’
So near was she to sleep that all her responses were as if anaesthetized. After a pause she said so indistinctly that he could hardly hear her: ‘John, my favourite disciple . . . how strange John of the Cross and John of the Revelation, too.’ She sighed, and said not good night but ‘À Dieu – to God, John.’
She said it not as we do nowadays as a single perfunctory word of farewell but as two, so that the expression seemed to recover its original meaning, but the last word was barely audible and carried her right over the threshold into her sleep.
It was only then that he realized fully how tired she must have been and that recently she must have had even less sleep than he. Indeed she was so quickly asleep that he had no chance to ask for her name and up to that moment it had never occurred to him to do so. It was as if he had assumed that he knew it, so particular did she feel to him and their intimacy of such long standing. Indeed he felt as if he had known her before birth and could go on knowing her beyond death. Thinking, ‘I’ll ask her later,’ he drew her closer into his arms and he, too, fell asleep.
He slept deeply and long until he woke many hours later, his first thoughts being of intense unease. Yes! The telephone in his room next door was ringing loudly in one long, unbroken chain of urgent sound. She was still happily fast asleep. He managed to leave the room without waking her.
The Australian Brigade-Major was on the line. ‘That you, Colonel Lawrence? Good.’ The officer spoke with a suspicious nonchalance which Lawrence knew well came to his kind only in moments of extreme crisis: ‘Thought you’d like to know our night patrols have just come in. The Japs are coming up fast on a broad front. Thousands and thousands of the little bastards everywhere, on foot, on bicycles and in trucks. We shall be at it any moment now and the Brigadier asks me to tell you he expects to give you the directions you asked for yesterday within half an hour.’