“But I don’t know. I don’t know whether you’re at the end or the beginning. I could tell better if you were here.”
She counted the months till April when her poems would come out. She counted the days till Tuesday when there might be a letter from Richard Nicholson.
If only he would not keep on telling you you ought to come to London. That was what made you afraid. He might have seen how impossible it was. He had seen Mamma.
“Don’t try to dig me out of my ‘hole.’ I can ‘go on living in it forever’ if I’m never taken out. But if I got out once it would be awful coming back. It isn’t awful now. Don’t make it awful.”
He only wrote: “I’ll make it awfuller and awfuller, until out you come.”
Chapter XXXII
I
Things were happening in the village.
The old people were dying. Mr. James had died in a fit the day after Christmas Day. Old Mrs. Heron had died of a stroke in the first week of January. She had left Dorsy her house and furniture and seventy pounds a year. Mrs. Belk got the rest.
The middle-aged people were growing old. Louisa Wright’s hair hung in a limp white fold over each ear, her face had tight lines in it that pulled it into grimaces, her eyes had milky white rings like speedwell when it begins to fade. Dorsy Heron’s otter brown hair was striped with grey; her nose stood up sharp and bleak in her red, withering face; her sharp, tender mouth drooped at the corners. She was forty-nine.
It was cruel, cruel, cruel; it hurt you to see them. Rather than own it was cruel they went about pulling faces and pretending they were happy. Their gestures had become exaggerated, tricks that they would never grow out of, that gave them the illusion of their youth.
The old people were dying and the middle-aged people were growing old. Nothing would ever begin for them again.
Each morning when she got out of bed she had the sacred, solemn certainty that for her everything was beginning. At thirty-nine.
What was thirty-nine? A time-feeling, a feeling she hadn’t got. If you haven’t got the feeling you are not thirty-nine. You can be any age you please, twenty-nine, nineteen.
But she had been horribly old at nineteen. She could remember what it had felt like, the desperate, middle-aged sadness, the middle-aged certainty that nothing interesting would ever happen. She had got hold of life at the wrong end.
And all the time her youth had been waiting for her at the other end, at the turn of the unknown road, at thirty-nine. All through the autumn and winter Richard Nicholson had kept on writing. Her poems would be out on the tenth of April.
On the third the note came.
“Shall I still find you at Morfe if I come down this weekend?—R.N.”
“You will never find me anywhere else.—M.O.”
“I shall bike from Durlingham. If you’ve anything to do in Reyburn it would be nice if you met me at The King’s Head about four. We could have tea there and ride out together.—R.N.”
II
“I’m excited. I’ve never been to tea in an hotel before.”
She was chattering like a fool, saying anything that came into her head, to break up the silence he made.
She was aware of something underneath it, something that was growing more and more beautiful every minute. She was trying to smash this thing lest it should grow more beautiful than she could bear.
“You see how I score by being shut up in Morfe. When I do get out it’s no end of an adventure.” (Was there ever such an idiot?)
Suddenly she left off trying to smash the silence.
The silence made everything stand out with a supernatural clearness, the square, white-clothed table in the bay of the window, the Queen Anne fluting on the Britannia metal teapot, the cups and saucers and plates, white with a gentian blue band, The King’s Head stamped in gold like a crest.
Sitting there so still he had the queer effect of creating for both of you a space of your own, more real than the space you had just stepped out of. There, there and not anywhere else, these supernaturally clear things had reality, a unique but impermanent reality. It would last as long as you sat there and would go when you went. You knew that whatever else you might forget you would remember this.
The rest of the room, the other tables and the people sitting at them were not quite real. They stood in another space, a different and inferior kind of space.
“I came first of all,” he said, “to bring you that.”
He took out of his pocket and put down between them the thin, new white parchment book of her Poems.
“Oh … Poor thing, I wonder what’ll happen to it?” Funny—it was the least real thing. If it existed at all it existed somewhere else, not in this space, not in this time. If you took it up and looked at it the clearness, the unique, impermanent reality would be gone, and you would never get it again.
They had finished the run down Reyburn hill. Their pace was slackening on the level.
He said, “That’s a jolly bicycle of yours.”
“Isn’t it? I’m sure you’ll like to know I bought it with the wonderful cheque you gave me. I should never have had it without that.”
“I’m glad you got something out of that awful time.”
“Awful? It was one of the nicest times I’ve ever had. … Nearly all my nice times have been in that house.”
“I know,” he said. “My uncle would let you do anything you liked if you were young enough. He ought to have had children of his own. They’d have kept him out of mischief.”
“I can’t think,” she said to the surrounding hills, “why people get
