When he found that she did not speak, he began to offer clipped remarks, anxiously pointing out objects that she was quite unable to see.
“It’s a good house, missis. … You’ll remember it’s a tidy spot. There’s a fairish garden for cabbishes and the like, and a bit of a drying-ground as well. As for berry-bushes, there’s gooseberry and black currant and red … and danged if there isn’t a few rasps over at far side wall an’ all!”
Sarah looked away from the house the moment he started to speak, as if some spell were broken by the sound of his voice. “Ay,” she said, with a total lack of interest, and staring ahead. … “Now, master, we’d best get on.”
Simon, cut off in mid-flight, repeated “Rasps!” in a feeble tone, and again Sarah said “Ay,” and requested him to get on. He drove away rather reluctantly, looking behind him as he went, and muttering of Taylor’s rasps and cabbishes until they were finally lost to sight.
Now once more they were in the high-flanked lane, with Blindbeck and all that Blindbeck stood for fallen away at last. The cross went with them, indeed, but the calvary dropped behind. The horse turned homeward, and, encouraged by Will’s corn, showed a sudden freakish revival of vanished youth. Bicycles met and passed them in the narrow road, sliding by like thistledown on a wind, while the riders saw only an elderly couple apparently half asleep. Yet even the dullest farm-lad would have cried aloud to them if he had known to what they went. He would have flung himself off his bicycle and barred the road, a humble but valiant imitation of an Angel of God.
Evening was coming, but the day was still alive, incredibly long as the afternoon had seemed. Simon’s old watch, put right that morning in Witham, asserted that it was only half-past four. The atmosphere had never been really light, and only imperceptibly was it drawing down to dusk. The grey seemed to have deepened and settled a little, but that was all. It was a day on which people forgot the time, as Mr. Dent had said, a day when they had every excuse for forgetting the right time. Simon felt suddenly as though he had never seen the sun either rise or set for at least a week. Yesterday there had been only a swift setting, hurriedly blotted out, and today, if there had been any fugitive brightness of farewell, it must have passed while they were still at the farm. The night was coming unduly to the grey-green land which had never had its meed of sun, just as the night came unfairly to lives whose share of glamour and glory had been missed. He longed to see a light spring out of the west, showing the silver water in a shining line, and re-tinting the heavy, neutral-coloured earth.
Sun—evening sun lying over the sea—would have made things easier for both of them, but especially for his wife. Even though there was so little that she could see, the warmth and light would at least have lain tenderly upon her lids. Trouble and change were always easier to bear under a smiling sky; it did not mock at the trouble, as smiling faces so often seemed to do. Rain and the dark seemed to narrow a trouble in, so that change was a nameless peril into which each step was into a void. But there was to be no sun for these lost folk who seemed to be straying all the day long; only the unstirred breath of the mist in the blotted west, filling the mighty bowl at whose bottom lay the sea.
They felt strange with each other, now that they were alone, because of all that the other had done while the two of them were apart. Simon’s sudden decision was as inexplicable to his wife as her afternoon’s jest with Eliza had seemed to him. In his place she would never have stooped to make of herself the younger brother’s man; she would have worked for the hardest driver amongst them sooner than that. Even the close affection between the brothers could not dignify the position in her eyes. She could understand something of Simon’s yearning towards the farm, but Sarah was never the sort of which they make doorkeepers in Heaven. She would never really have understood the strength of the pull, even with no Eliza set like a many-eyed monster on the farmyard wall. He, on the other hand, could not even pretend to understand the Lie, but then the Vision of the Parlour had been granted to her and not to him.
Both their minds, however, were at work more on the change that was coming than on Sarah’s sudden craze, since always the pressing business of life must supersede the dream. Simon, indeed, did not want to think about Sarah’s behaviour further than he could help, because of that sinister saying about the doings of blind brains. As for Sarah herself, she had done with the dream forever in that moment when she came face to face with the limits of her lie. It had had its tremendous hour in the down-treading of a lifelong foe, but in that one stupendous achievement it had finally passed. Never again would she be able to shut herself in the spell, until the blind saw and the lost spoke, and the sea was crossed in a leap. Never again would she be able to believe that Geordie might come home.
In spite of their shameful departure, fast fading, however, from his mind, Simon was already planning the bittersweet prospect of their near return. Like so many ideas impossible and even repellent at the start, this had already become natural and full of an acid charm. For the time being he was content to ignore the drawbacks of the
