She had forgotten how to play Chopin’s Fontana Polonaise.
XI
Stone walls. A wild country, caught in the net of the stone walls.
Stone walls following the planes of the land, running straight along the valleys, switchbacking up and down the slopes. Humped-up, grey spines of the green mounds.
Stone walls, piled loosely, with the brute skill of earthmen, building centuries ago. They bulged, they toppled, yet they stood firm, holding the wild country in their mesh, knitting the grey villages to the grey farms, and the farms to the grey byres. Where you thought the net had ended it flung out a grey rope over the purple back of Renton, the green shoulder of Greffington.
Outside the village, the schoolhouse lane, a green trench sunk between stone walls, went up and up, turning three times. At the top of the last turn a gate.
When you had got through the gate you were free.
It led on to the wide, flat half-ring of moor that lay under Karva. The moor and the high mound of the hill were free; they had slipped from the net of the walls.
Broad sheep-drives cut through the moor. Inlets of green grass forked into purple heather. Green streamed through purple, lapped against purple, lay on purple in pools and splashes.
Burnt patches. Tongues of heather, twisted and pointed, picked clean by fire, flickering grey over black earth. Towards evening the black and grey ran together like ink and water, stilled into purple, the black purple of grapes.
If you shut your eyes you could see the flat Essex country spread in a thin film over Karva. Thinner and thinner. But you could remember what it had been like. Low, tilled fields, thin trees; sharp, queer, uncertain beauty. Sharp, queer, uncertain happiness, coming again and again, never twice to the same place in the same way. It hurt you when you remembered it.
The beauty of the hills was not like that. It stayed. It waited for you, keeping faith. Day after day, night after night, it was there.
Happiness was there. You were sure of it every time. Roddy’s uneasy eyes, Papa’s feet, shuffling in the passage, Mamma’s disapproving, remembering face, the Kendals’ house, smelling of rotten apples, the old man, coughing and weeping in his chair, they couldn’t kill it; they couldn’t take it away.
The mountain sheep waited for you. They stood back as you passed, staring at you with their look of wonder and sadness.
Grouse shot up from your feet with a “Rek‑ek‑ek‑kek!” in sudden, explosive flight.
Plovers rose, wheeling round and round you with sharper and sharper cries of agitation. “Pee-vit—pee-vit—pee-vit! Pee-vitt!” They swooped, suddenly close, close to your eyes; you heard the drumming vibration of their wings.
Away in front a line of sheep went slowly up and up Karva. The hill made their bleating mournful and musical.
You slipped back into the house. In the lamp-lighted drawing-room the others sat, bored and tired, waiting for prayer-time. They hadn’t noticed how long you had been gone.
XII
“Roddy, I wish you’d go and see where your father is.”
Roddy looked up from his sketchbook. He had filled it with pictures of cavalry on plunging chargers, trains of artillery rushing into battle, sailing ships in heavy seas.
Roddy’s mind was possessed by images of danger and adventure.
He flourished off the last wave of battle-smoke, and shut the sketchbook with a snap.
Mamma knew perfectly well where Papa was. Roddy knew. Catty and Maggie the cook knew. Everybody in the village knew. Regularly, about six o’clock in the evening, he shuffled out of the house and along the High Row to the Buck Hotel, and towards dinnertime Roddy had to go and bring him back. Everybody knew what he went for.
He would have to hold Papa tight by the arm and lead him over the cobblestones. They would pass the long bench at the corner under the Kendals’ wall; and Mr. Oldshaw, the banker, and Mr. Horn, the grocer, and Mr. Acroyd, the shoemaker, would be sitting there talking to Mr. Belk, who was justice of the peace. And they would see Papa. The young men squatting on the flagstones outside the “Farmer’s Arms” and the “King’s Head” would see him. And Papa would stiffen and draw himself up, trying to look dignified and sober.
When he was very bad Mamma would cry, quietly, all through dinnertime. But she would never admit that he went to the Buck Hotel. He had just gone off nobody knew where and Roddy had got to find him.
August, September and October passed.
XIII
“Didn’t I tell you to wait? You know them all now. You see what they’re like.”
In Roddy’s voice there was a sort of tired, bitter triumph.
She knew them all now: Mrs. Waugh and Miss Frewin, and the Kendals; Mr. Spencer Rollitt, and Miss Louisa Wright who had had a disappointment; and old Mrs. Heron. They were all old.
Oh, and there was Dorsy Heron, Mrs. Heron’s niece. But Dorsy was old too, twenty-seven. She was no good; she couldn’t talk to Roddy; she could only look at him with bright, shy eyes, like a hare.
Roddy and Mary were going up the Garthdale road. At the first turn they saw Mrs. Waugh and her son coming towards them. (She had forgotten Norman Waugh.)
Rodney groaned. “He’s here again. I say, let’s go back.”
“We can’t. They’ve seen us.”
“Everybody sees us,” Roddy said.
He began to walk with a queer, defiant, self-conscious jerk.
Mrs. Waugh came on, buoyantly, as if the hoop of a crinoline still held her up.
“Well, Mary, going for another walk?”
She stopped, in a gracious mood to show off her son. When she looked at Roddy her raised eyebrows said, “Still here, doing nothing?”
“Norman’s going back to work on Monday,” she said.
The son stood
