“They have certainly a most remarkable naivety.”
“I’ve today seen your Queen. She’s just a vurry hoamely little old lady.”
“What? What is that?”
“Then they were funny.” She searched her memory to make him go on giggling. It was extraordinary too, to discover what impressions she had gathered without knowing it, never considering or stating them to herself. He was getting them. If she ever stated them again they would be stale; practised clever talk; that was how talk was done … saying things over and over again to numbers of people, each time a little more brilliantly and the speaker a little more dead behind it. Nothing could be repeated.
“That was the same year. Mrs. Bailey had a splendid August. Eighteen Americans. I used to go down to meals just to be in the midst of the noise. You never heard anything like it in your life. If you listened without trying to distinguish anything it was marvellous, in the bright sunshine at breakfast. It sent you up and up, into the sky, the morning stars singing together. No. I mean there was something really wonderful about it. It reminded me of the effect that almost comes when people decide to have a Dutch concert. You know. All singing different songs at the same time. It’s always spoilt. People begin it prepared not to hear the whole effect. I did. I did not realise there would be a wonderful whole. And always just as the effect is beginning, two or three people break down because they cannot hold their songs, and some laugh because they are prepared only to laugh, and the unmusical people put their fingers to their ears, because they can never hear sound, never anything but a tune. Oh it would be so wonderful, if only it could be really held, everyone singing for all they were worth.”
“Have you heard that the Shah preferred of a whole concert, only the tuning of the orchestra?”
“I know. That’s always supposed to be a joke. But the tuning of an orchestra, if there is enough of it at once, is wonderful. Why not both? It’s the appalling way people have of liking only one thing. Liking ‘good’ music and disapproving of waltzes. The Germans don’t.”
“But when I thought of one of my sisters, I used to want to die. If she had been there we should both have yelled, without moving a muscle of our faces. Harriett is perfect for that. We learnt it in church. But when she used to twist all the fingers of her gloves into points, under the seat, and then show them to me suddenly, in the Litany.” …
“What? What is this? No. Tell me. You were very happy with your sisters.”
“That’s all. She waggled them, suddenly.”
“A happy childhood is perhaps the most-fortunate gift in life.”
“You don’t know you’re happy.”
“That is not the point. This early surrounding lingers and affects all the life.”
“It’s not quite true that you don’t know. Because you know when you are quite young how desperately you love a place. The day we left our first home I remember putting marbles in my pocket in the nursery, not minding, only thinking I should take them out again by the sea, and downstairs in the garden I suddenly realised, the sun was shining on to the porch and bees swinging about amongst the roses, and I ran back and kissed the warm yellow stone of the house, sobbing most bitterly and knowing my life was at an end.”
“But you were six years old. That is what is important. You do not perhaps realise the extent of the remaining of this free life of garden and woods with you.”
“I know it is there. I often dream I am there and wake there, and for a few minutes I could draw the house, the peaked shapes of it, and the porches and french windows and the way the lawns went off into the mysterious parts of the garden; and I feel then as if going away were still to come, an awful thing that had never happened. Of course after the years in the small house by the sea, I don’t remember the house, only the sea and the rocks, the house at Barnes grew in a way to be the same, but I never got over the suddenness of the end of the garden and always expected it to branch out into distances, every time I ran down it. I used to run up and down to make it more. …” He was no longer following with such an intentness of interest. There ought to have been more about those first years. Now, no one would ever know what they had been. …
“But you know, although nothing the Americans say is worth hearing, there is something wonderful about the way they go on. The way they all talk at once, nobody listening. It’s because they all know what they are going to say and everyone wants to say it first. They used to talk in parties; a set of people at one part of the table all screaming together towards a set at another part, and other people screaming across them at another set. The others began screaming back at once, endless questions, and if two sets had seen the same thing they all screamed together as soon as it was mentioned. I never heard one person talking alone; not in that August set. And there was one woman, a clergyman’s wife, with a little pretty oval face and the most perfect muslin dresses which she did not appreciate, who used to begin as soon as she came in
