He began walking up and down the room, turning on her again and again, making himself more and more excited.
“That translation of the Bacchae—what made you think of doing it like that?”
“I’d been reading Walt Whitman—It showed me you could do without rhyme. I knew it must sound as if it was all spoken—chanted—that they mustn’t sing. Then I thought perhaps that was the way to do it.”
“Yes. Yes. It is the way to do it. The only way. … You see, that’s what my Euripides book’s about. The very thing I’ve been trying to ram down people’s throats, for years. And all the time you were doing it—down here—all by yourself—for fun … I wish I’d known … What are you going to do about it?”
“I didn’t think anything could be done.”
He sat down to consider that part of it.
He was going to get it published for her.
He was going to write the Introduction.
“And—the other things?”
“Oh, well, that’s another matter. There’s not much of it that’ll stand.”
He knew. He would never say more or less than he meant.
Not much of it that would stand. Now that she knew, it was extraordinary how little she minded.
“Still, there are a few things. They must come out first. In the spring. Then the Bacchae in the autumn. I want it to be clear from the start that you’re a poet translating; not the other way on.”
He walked home with her, discussing gravely how it would be done.
IV
It had come without surprise, almost without excitement; the quiet happening of something secretly foreseen, present to her mind as long as she could remember.
“I always meant that this should happen: something like this.”
Now that it had happened she was afraid, seeing, but not so clearly, what would come afterwards: something that would make her want to leave Morfe and Mamma and go away to London and know the people Richard Nicholson had told her about, the people who would care for what she had done; the people who were doing the things she cared about. To talk to them; to hear them talk. She was afraid of wanting that more than anything in the world.
She saw her fear first in Mamma’s eyes when she told her.
And there was something else. Something to do with Richard Nicholson. Something she didn’t want to think about. Not fear exactly, but a sort of uneasiness when she thought about him.
His mind really was the enormous, perfect crystal she had imagined. It had been brought close to her; she had turned it in her hand and seen it flash and shine. She had looked into it and seen beautiful, clear things in it: nothing that wasn’t beautiful and clear. She was afraid of wanting to look at it again when it wasn’t there. Because it had made her happy she might come to want it more than anything in the world.
In two weeks it would be gone. She would want it and it would not be there.
V
When she passed the house and saw the long rows of yellow blinds in the grey front she thought of him. He would not come back. He had never come before, so it wasn’t likely he would come again.
His being there was one of the things that only happened once. Perhaps those were the perfect things, the things that would never pass away; they would stay forever, beautiful as you had seen them, fixed in their moment of perfection, wearing the very air and light of it forever.
You would see them sub specie ceternitatis. Under the form of eternity.
So that Richard Nicholson would always be like that, the same whenever you thought of him.
Look at the others: the ones that hadn’t come back and the ones that had. Jimmy Ponsonby, Harry Craven, Mr. Sutcliffe. And Maurice Jourdain and Lindley Vickers. If Maurice Jourdain had never come back she would always have seen him standing in the cornfield. If Lindley Vickers had never come back she wouldn’t have seen him with Nannie Learoyd in the schoolhouse lane; the moment when he held her hands in the drawing-room, standing by the piano, would have been their one eternal moment.
Because Jimmy Ponsonby had gone away she had never known the awful thing he had done. She would go through the Ilford fields forever and ever with her hot hand in his; she happy and he innocent; innocent forever and ever. Harry Craven, her playmate of two hours, he would always be playing, always laughing, always holding her hand, like Roddy, without knowing that he held it.
Suppose Mr. Sutcliffe had come back. She would have hurt them more and more. Mrs. Sutcliffe would have hated her. They would have been miserable, all three. All three damned forever and ever.
She was not sure she wanted Richard Nicholson to come back.
She was not sure he wasn’t spoiling it by writing. She hadn’t thought he would do that.
A correspondence? Prolonging the beautiful moment, stretching it thin; thinner and thinner; stretching it so thin that it would snap? You would come to identify him with his letters, so that in the end you would lose what had been real, what had been perfect. You would forget. You would have another and less real kind of memory.
But his letters were not thin; they were as real as his voice. They were his voice talking to you; you could tell which words would take the stress of it. “I don’t know how much there is of you, whether this is all of it or only a little bit. You gave me an impression—you made me feel that there might be any amount gone under that you can’t get at, that you may never get at if you go on staying where you are. I believe if you got clean away
