Strange Stories Read Online Free Page A

something. It possibly elucidated one of the earliest of her odd remarks.
    ‘I’ll help you to find one, if you like,’ said the girl. ‘Father says that none of them have been lived in for hundreds of years. I know where all the best ones are.’
    ‘I’ll have to think about that,’ said Stephen. ‘I have my job, you must remember.’ He wanted her to be rude about his job.
    But she only said, ‘We’ll look now, if you like.’
    ‘Tomorrow, perhaps. We’re looking for the spring now.’
    ‘Are you tired?’ asked the girl, with apparently genuine concern, and presumably forgetting altogether what he had told her about his longing to walk all day.
    ‘Not at all tired,’ said Stephen, smiling at her.
    ‘Then why were you looking at your watch?’
    ‘A bad habit picked up in the civil service. We all do it.’
    He had observed long before that she had no watch on her lovely brown forearm, no bracelet; only the marks of thorn scratches and the incisions of sharp stones. The light golden bloom on her arms filled him with delight and with desire.
    In fact, he had omitted to time their progression, though he timed most things, so that the habit had wrecked his natural faculty. Perhaps another twenty or thirty minutes passed, while they continued to walk side by side, the track having as yet shown no particular sign of narrowing, so that one might think it still led somewhere, and that people still went there. As they advanced, they said little more of consequence for the moment; or so it seemed to Stephen. He surmised that there was now what is termed an understanding between them, even though in a sense he himself understood very little. It was more a phase for pleasant nothings, he deemed, always supposing that he could evolve a sufficient supply of them, than for meaningful questions and reasonable responses.
    Suddenly, the track seemed not to narrow, but to stop, even to vanish. Hereunto it had been surprisingly well trodden. Now he could see nothing but knee-high heather.
    ‘The spring’s over there,’ said the girl in a matter of fact way, and pointing. Such simple and natural gestures are often the most beautiful.
    ‘How right I was in saying that I could never find it alone!’ remarked Stephen.
    He could not see why the main track should not lead to the spring - if there really was a spring. Why else should the track be beaten to this spot? The mystery was akin to the Burton’s Clough mystery. The uplands had been settled under other conditions than ours. Stephen, on his perambulations, had always felt that, everywhere.
    But the girl was standing among the heather a few yards away, and Stephen saw that there was a curious serpentine rabbit run that he had failed to notice - except that rabbits do not run like serpents. There were several fair-sized birds flying overhead in silence. Stephen fancied they were kites.
    He wriggled his way down the rabbit path, with little dignity.
    There was the most beautiful small pool imaginable: clear, deep, lustrous, gently heaving at its centre, or near its centre. It stood in a small clearing.
    All the rivers in Britain might be taken as rising here, and thus flowing until the first moment of their pollution.
    Stephen became aware that now the sun really was shining. He had not noticed before. The girl stood on the far side of the pool in her faded shirt and trousers, smiling seraphically. The pool pleased her, so that suddenly everything pleased her.
    ‘Have you kept the note I gave you?’ asked Stephen.
    She put her hand lightly on her breast pocket, and therefore on her breast.
    ‘I’m glad,’ said Stephen.
    If the pool had not been between them, he would have seized her, whatever the consequences.
    ‘Just clear water,’ said the girl.
    The sun brought out new colours in her hair. The shape of her head was absolutely perfect.
    ‘The track,’ said Stephen, ‘seems to be quite well used. Is this where the people come?’
    ‘No,’ said the girl. ‘They