Read Online The Aerodrome: A Love Story by Rex Warner - Free Book Online

against my side, extending my fingers so as to cover as much as possible of their surfaces. A voice on our left hailed me and, turning my head, I saw the Flight-Lieutenant bending over a machine-gun in a small tent from which the Aerodrome colours were flying. He was informing a considerable crowd of bystanders of the mechanism and working of the gun, but had broken off his lecture, and shouted to me: "Be good, Roy! The bull's O. K." Bess smiled at him, and I nodded my head. Then we went out through the turnstile at the bottom of the field and, passing through the car park, entered another field in the corner of which were the remains of a haystack and, close to this, an old roofless mill with the river running smoothly past its grey stones. We sat down in the loose hay and looked towards the river and the meadows on the other side. Far away on the sunny grass I saw a hare sitting up on his hind legs. From some trees behind us came the continual calling of rooks. The show, the tents, and the crowd seemed to have been removed from us much farther than we had come and, as I looked at Bess, we seemed like castaways, not knowing what to expect. Her eyes held that soft, serious, remote, and unnatural look which I had come to know, and, as I stared into her eyes, the river, the meadow, the hare, and the rooks seemed to recede from us as the whole Agricultural Show had already receded. There was nothing now but the small space between us, and as I leaned towards her, stumbling over some foolish words, she also leaned to me, saying: "I love you, I love you," and as we pressed against each other in each other's arms I was stiff and blinded for some moments by my desire. Soon that wave of feeling receded and we lay more quietly, but soon it returned again, and we began fumbling with our clothes, reaching in an inexpert way for the satisfaction with which neither of us was perfectly acquainted. There were difficulties and dangers of which we had heard, expostulations and timidity. And there was something loose and scrambling in our love-making, nor was anything conspicuously beautiful or satisfactory achieved. Yet something had been done and, as I looked at Bess's flushed face, a new feeling of trust and of gratitude swelled up in my heart. "I shall always love you," I said, and was surprised to see her face not changed, but much more ordinary than it had been before. She rose to her feet, shaking the hay out of her hair. "We must go back," she said, and I saw that she was thinking already of the coconut shies, the roundabouts, the riding, and the jumping. I tried to find words to express my sense of the reality of what had happened and of my love, but I saw that, as I was speaking, Bess was giving me only half of her attention, and I began to feel that, in spite of what I was impelled to say, nothing very remarkable had taken place. This feeling increased both my tenderness and my desire. Bess was setting her clothes to rights, but I clutched her to me and pressed my mouth into her mouth, holding her tightly and cruelly, since she was wriggling in my arms. I saw her eyes, filled with fear, look into my eyes, and I felt, together with a wave of tenderness, a sharp pang of exasperation and almost of contempt for her. My grip on her relaxed and I stood dejected, with tears, I remember, beginning to brim over my eyelids. Just at this moment I heard someone call my name. We stepped apart from each other and saw the Flight-Lieutenant running towards us across the field. I seemed to detect what surprised me, a certain embarrassment in his manner, and he had ceased to run before he reached us. He spoke hesitatingly and said: "I say, Roy, something rather rotten has happened. I'm afraid I've potted your old man." I knew immediately from these words, inadequate as they were, that the Rector had been either killed or seriously wounded in some accident for which the Flight-Lieutenant had been responsible. I listened as he continued: "Of course, it