No. She was humbugging herself. Not up Karva because of her secret happiness. She didn’t want to mix him up with that or with the self that had felt it. She wanted to keep him in the clear spaces of her mind, away from her memories, away from her emotions.
They sat down on the side of the moor in the heather.
Indoors when he was working he was irritable and restless. You would hear a gentle sighing sound: “D‑amn”; and he would start up and walk about the room. There would be shakings of his head, twistings of his eyebrows, shruggings of his shoulders, and tormented gestures of his hands. But not out here. He sat in the heather as quiet, as motionless as you were, every muscle at rest. His mind was at rest.
The strong sunlight beat on him; it showed up small surface signs. Perhaps you could see now that he might really be forty, or even forty-five.
No, you couldn’t. You couldn’t see or feel anything but the burning, inextinguishable youth inside him. The little grey streaks and patches might have been powder put on for fun.
“I want to finish with all my Greek stuff,” he said suddenly. “I want to go on to something else—studies in modern French literature. Then English. I want to get everything clean and straight in five pages where other people would take fifty. … I want to go smash through some of the traditions. The tradition of the long, grey paragraph. … We might learn things from France. But we’re a proud island people. We won’t learn. … We’re a proud island people, held in too tight, held in till we burst. That’s why we’ve no aesthetic restraint. No restraint of any sort. Take our economics. Take our politics. We’ve had to colonise, to burst out over continents. When our minds begin moving it’s the same thing. They burst out. All over the place. … When we’ve learned restraint we shall take our place inside Europe, not outside it.”
“We do restrain our emotions quite a lot.”
“We do. We do. That’s precisely why we don’t restrain our expression of them. Really unrestrained emotion that forces its way through and breaks down your intellectual defences and saturates you with itself—it hasn’t any words. … It hasn’t any words; or very few.”
The mown fields over there, below Greffington Edge, were bleached with the sun: the grey cliffs quivered in the hot yellow light.
“It might be somewhere in the South of France.”
“Not Agaye.”
“No. Not Agaye. The limestone country. … I can’t think why I never came here. My uncle used to ask me dozens of times. I suppose I funked it. … What the poor old chap must have felt like shut up in that house all those years with my aunt—”
“Please don’t. I—I liked her.”
“You mean you liked him and put up with her because of him. We all did that.”
“She was kind to me.”
“Who wouldn’t be?”
“Oh, but you don’t know how kind.”
“Kind? Good Lord, yes. There are millions of kind people in the world. It’s possible to be kind and at the same time not entirely brainless.”
“He wouldn’t mind that. He wouldn’t think she was brainless—”
“He wasn’t in love with her—there was another woman—a girl. It was so like the dear old duffer to put it off till he was forty-five and then come a cropper over a little girl of seventeen.”
“That isn’t true. I knew him much better than you do. He never cared for anybody but her. … Besides, if it was true you shouldn’t have told me. I’ve no business to know it. …”
“Everybody knew it. The poor dear managed so badly that everybody in the place knew it. She knew, that’s why she dragged him away and made him live abroad. She hated living abroad, but she liked it better than seeing him going to pieces over the girl.”
“I don’t believe it. If there was anything in it I’d have been sure to have heard of it. … Why, there wasn’t anybody here but me—”
“It must have been years before your time,” he said. “You could hardly even have come in for the sad end of it.”
Dorsy Heron said it was true.
“It was you he was in love with. Everybody saw it but you.”
She remembered. His face when she came to him. In the library. And what he had said.
“A man might be in love with you for ten years and you wouldn’t know about it if he held his tongue.”
And her face. Her poor face, so worried when people saw them together. And that last night when she stroked your arm and when she saw him looking at it and stopped. And her eyes. Frightened. Frightened.
“How I must have hurt him. How I must have hurt them both.”
Mr. Nicholson had come back on Friday as he had said.
III
He put down his scratching pen and was leaning back in his chair, looking at her.
She wondered what he was thinking. Sometimes the space of the room was enormous between her table by the first tall window and his by the third; sometimes it shrank and brought them close. It was bringing them close now.
“You can’t see the text for the footnotes,” she said. “The notes must go in the Appendix.”
She wanted to make herself forget that all her own things, the things she had saved from the last burning, were lying there on his table, staring at her. She was trying not to look that way, not to let herself imagine for a moment that he had read them.
“Never mind the notes and the Appendix.”
He had got up. He was leaning now against the tall shutter of her window, looking down at her.
“Why didn’t you tell me? Before I let you in for that horrible drudgery? All that typing and indexing—If I’d only known you were doing anything like this. … Why couldn’t you have told me?”
“Because I wasn’t doing it. It was done ages ago.”
“It’s my fault. I ought
