The Haunted Storm Read Online Free Page B

oh, that’s nonsense; no, I didn’t feel complete but I felt alive at least and with matter, the solid earth, flesh, skin, bone, blood, grass, wood, stone, matter! It was friendly and not alien! Then I drifted – oh, what’s going on down there?” she interjected suddenly. Matthew was staring at the boat down on the Spur; he was not sure, but somebody seemed to be moving on the deck. The waves continued to crash against the far side and break streaming over the top. The girl twisted her head round momentarily; “what’s going on?” she said. “Is it important?” Matthew shook his head. He squeezed the flesh of her left thigh with his palm, and pressed the back of his fingers into the softness of the other. He was poised, balancing carefully, between three forces: her flesh; her words: and the boat. By pursuing any of these too far he would lose all of them. He had somehow to maintain this balance and let all three carry him to – well, to whatever pitch he was destined to reach. The simple motion of his fingers pressing in and out of the flesh of her thigh made him tremble with lust. He leant forward to listen carefully and concentrate on what she was saying.
    “I saw something – I forget what it was – a bottle or something like that – shake and shake, just because he wanted it to. He – it was in his room, that’s right, he had a room in the town and I stayed a few times with him and slept with him. It was empty, I mean he had no luggage or belongings or anything except a few books. They were mostly about economics. He knew all about politics. He belonged to a party. I don’t know which one; I don’t think it was the Communist party but I don’t know… politics, oh it’s so earthly too – not earthly in the sort of precious, you know aesthetic sense – no! – but there’s a harshness and solidity about it, and earthiness; yes, really it’s the highest phase of matter, I suppose, where matter’s densest.”
    Matthew, balancing, took his eyes off her and looked down the beach again. It was not easy; in motion, and especially when she was searching for the right phrase to describe what she meant, her face was so animated, and with such a passionate withdrawn mystery struggling in it – the very same, identically the same mystery, he was convinced, which ravished him – that he was in love, and so deep that he could not move or look away without an effort. But when he did, he saw movement on the beach. A hundred yards or so to his right, lit by the omnipresent lightness of things themselves under the gloom of the streaming sky, he could make out six or seven men struggling along against the wind towards the Spur. They did not seem to be on the same beach; hardly on the same planet. There was no question of acknowledging their presence, far less of trying to conceal what he was doing. He watched them come, and continued to caress her, moving his hand gradually closer and closer to the top of her thighs, and to listen intently to what she was saying.
    “I’ll tell you about when he met my parents. It was in May. My mother – oh she’s so secret and possessive and deathly proud about me! – wanted to meet him and she made me ask him to supper, though I didn’t want them to meet. But she insisted and when he came I’d just had a row with my father and we were all tense; and he hardly said a word until suddenly, out of the blue, he said to my father ‘I hear you’ve discovered a well.’ And it was just as if he knew it was the worst thing in the world he could have said, because the well is my father’s secret really and he was furious when it came out in the local paper about him – the well proves something important in his system of religion – oh God;” and she shivered as if with a great effort, “help me get to it.
    “So we all went quiet. And my father said yes, he had, and what about it. And my lover said ‘l want it; that’s all.’ Just like that, as calm as you please; but