“Won’t they do all that for you?”
“Still I think I’ll go. … Addio.” She backed along the little pathway watching him seek and find his words, crying each one forth in a thoughtful falsetto, while he turned conversationally towards Miss Prout. The scene was cut off by the bushes, but she could still hear his voice, after the breakdown of his Italian into an ironic squeal, going on in charge of it. She sped across the lawn and up on to the open above the unexplored terraces. They could wait. For the moment, unpeopled, they were nothing. They would be the background of further scenes, all threaded by the sound of Hypo’s voice, lit by the innumerable things she would hear him say, obliterating the surroundings, making far-off things seem more real. … Mental liveliness did obliterate surroundings, stop their expressiveness. Already the first expressiveness had gone from the garden. She did not want to create it afresh. There was hurry and pressure now in the glances she threw. A wrongness. Something left out. There was something left out, left behind, in his scheme of things. She wandered as far as the horizon row of irises to look out over the sea, chased and pulled back as she went. Until the distant prospect opened and part of the slope of the garden lay at her feet. The light had ripened. The sun no longer towered, but blazed across at her from above the rightmost edge of the picture. Short shadows jutted from the feet of every standing thing. The light was deepening in perfect stillness. Wind and rain had left the world for good. This was her holiday. Everything behind her broke down into irrelevance. … How go back to it. … How not stay and live through the changing of the light in this perfect stillness. …
There was no feeling of Sunday in the house. But when Miriam wandered into her room during the after breakfast lull, she found it waiting for her; pouring into the room from afar, from all over the world, breaking her march, breaking up the lines of the past and of the future, isolating her with itself. The openings of the long lattice framed wide strips of morning brilliance between short close-drawn folds of flowered chintz. Everything outside was sharp and near, but changed since yesterday. The flowers stood vivid in the sunlight; very still. The humming of the bees sounded careful and secret; not wishing to disturb. The sea sparkled to itself, refusing to call the eye. Yet outside there, as in the room, something called. She leaned out. Into the enlarged picture the sky poured down. The pure blue moved within itself as you looked, letting you through and up. An unbroken fabric of light, yet opening all over, taking you up into endless light. …
Sunday is in the sky. …
Hypo, coming round the corner from the terrace, his arms threshing the air to the beat of his swift walk; knitting up the moment, casting kind radiance as he came. Married, but casting radiance. He was making for the house. Then Miss Prout was somewhere down there alone. … She hurried to be out, seeking her. On the landing she ran into Hypo.
“Hullo, Miriametta. Going out?”
“I think so. Where’s everybody?”
“Everybody, and chairs, is down on the terrace. But you’ll want a hat.”
“I shan’t.” He had often admired her ability to go without. He had been talking to Miss Prout for the last half hour and was now abstractedly making a shapely thing of a chance meeting with a stranger. … His words had carried him to the study door. He began inventing his retort, the unfelt shape of words that would carry him on undisturbed, facing the door with his back to her, hand on the doorknob. The end of it would find him within. She cried out at random into the making of his phrase and escaped into the dining-room to the sound of his voice. In the empty dining-room she found again the listening presence of Sunday and hurried to be through it and away at whatever centre had formed down there in the open. Going down the steps and along the paths she entered the movement of the day, the beginning of the sense of tomorrow, that would strengthen with the slow shifting of the sabbath light. Miss Prout came into view round the first bend, a sunlit figure in a tub chair on the grassy level at the end of the terrace. She had no hat. Her dark head was bent over the peak made in her flowing draperies by her crossed knees. She was sewing. Here. In public, serenely, the first thing in the morning.
Strolling to join her Miriam saw her as she had been last night, set like a flower, unaccented and harmonious, in her pleated gown of old rose silk, towards the oval of dinner-table, an island of softly bright silk-shaded radiance in the midst of the twilit room; under the brightest of the central light, filmy flowers massed low in a wide shallow bowl … a gentleness about her, touching the easy beginnings of talk, each phrase pearly, catching the light, expanding; expressing a secret joy. Then the gathering and settling of the flow of talk between him and her, lifting, shaking itself out, flashing into sharp clear light; the fabric of words pierced by his wails of amusement as he looked, still talking, at the pictures they drew. … People they knew passing to and fro; all laughable, all brought to their strange shared judgment. The charm of the scene destroyed by the surrounding vision of a wit-wrecked world.
After dinner that moment when she had drawn herself up before him, suddenly young, with radiant eyes; looking like a flower in her petaled gown. He had responded standing very upright, smiling back at her, admiring her deliberate effect. …
The break away across the landing, white and green night brightness under the switched-on lights, into the dusk of the study,
