He had only made it for you. She, poor thing, would have to put up with other people’s time, time that made them middle-aged, made them old.
You had got to write and tell him you were glad. You had got to tell him Mamma died ten days ago. And he would say to himself, “If I’d waited another ten days—” There was nothing he could say to you.
That was why he didn’t write again. There was nothing to say.
Chapter XXXV
I
She would never get used to the house.
She couldn’t think why she had been such a fool as to take it. On a seven years’ lease, too; it would feel like being in prison for seven years.
That was the worst of moving about for a whole year in boats and trains, and staying at hotels; it gave you an unnatural longing to settle down, in a place of your own.
Your own—Undying lust of possession. If you had to have things, why a house? Why six rooms when two would have done as well and left you your freedom? After all that ecstasy of space, that succession of heavenly places with singing names: Carcassone and Vezelay; Rome and Florence and San Gimignano; Marseilles and Arles and Avignon; filling up time, stretching it out, making a long life out of one year.
If you could go moving on and on while time stood still.
Oh this damned house. It would be you sitting still while time tore by, as it used to tear by at Morfe before Richard came, and in the three years after he had gone, when Mamma—
II
It was rather attractive, when you turned the corner and came on it suddenly, flat-roofed and small, clean white and innocent. The spring twilight gave it that look of being somewhere in Italy, the look that made you fall in love with it at first sight.
As for not getting used to it, that was precisely the effect she wanted: rooms that wouldn’t look like anything in the house at Morfe, things that she would always come on with a faint, exquisite surprise: the worn magentaish rug on the dark polished floor, the oak table, the gentian blue chair, the thin magenta curtains letting the light through: the things Richard had given her because in their beginning they had been meant for her. Richard knew that you were safe from unhappiness, that you had never once “gone back on it,” if you could be happy with his things.
He had thought, too, that if you had a house you would settle down and work.
You would have to; you would have to work like blazes, after spending all the money Aunt Charlotte left you on rushing about, and half the money Aunt Lavvy left you on settling down. It was horrible this living on other people’s deaths.
III
Catty couldn’t bear it being so different. You could see she thought you were unfaithful not to have kept the piano when Mamma had played on it.
Catty’s faithfulness was unsurpassable. She had wanted to marry Blenkiron, the stonemason at Morfe, but first she wouldn’t because of Mamma and then she wouldn’t because of Miss Mary. When you told her to go back and marry him at once she would only laugh and say, “There’s your husband, and there’s your children. You’re my child, Miss Mary. Master Roddy was Jenny’s child and you was always mine.”
You were only ten years younger than Catty, but like Richard she couldn’t see that you were old.
You would never know whether Catty knew about Richard; or whether Dorsy knew. Whatever you did they would love you, Catty because you were her child, and Dorsy because you were Mark’s sister.
IV
The sun had been shining for a fortnight. She could sit out all day now in the garden.
It was nonsense to talk about time standing still if you kept on moving. Just now, in the garden, when the light came through the thin green silk leaves of the lime tree, for a moment, while she sat looking at the lime tree, time stood still.
Catty had taken away the tea-things and was going down the four steps into the house. It happened between the opening and shutting of the door.
She saw that the beauty of the tree was its real life, and that its real life was in her real self and that her real self was God. The leaves and the light had nothing to do with it; she had seen it before when the tree was a stem and bare branches on a grey sky; and that beauty too was the real life of the tree.
V
If she could only dream about Mark. But if she dreamed about any of them it was always Mamma. She had left her in the house by herself and she had got out of her room to the stairhead. Or they were in London at the crossing by the Bank and Mamma was frightened. She had to get her through the thick of the traffic. The horses pushed at Mamma and you tried to hold back their noses, but she sank down and slid away from you sideways under the wheel.
Or she would come into this room and find her in it. At first she would be glad to see that Mamma was still there; then she would be unhappy and afraid. She would go on to a clear thought: if Mamma was still there, then she had got back somehow to Morfe. The old life
