1
... "And at fifty, when a woman is beginning to sit down intelligently
to life--behold, it is beginning to be time to take leave...."
That woman was an elderly woman of the world; but a dear. She
understood. She had spent her life in amongst people, having a life of
her own going on all the time; looking out at something through the
bars, whenever she was alone and sometimes in the midst of
conversations; but no one would see it, but people who _knew_. And now
she was free to step out and there was hardly any time left. But there
was a little time. Women who _know_ are quite brisk at fifty. "A man
must never be silent with a woman unless he wishes for the quiet
development of a relationship from which there is no withdrawing ... if
ordinary social intercourse cannot be kept up he must fly ... in silence
a man is an open book and unarmed. In speech with a man a woman is at a
disadvantage--because they speak different languages. She may understand
his. Hers he will never speak nor understand. In pity, or from other
motives she must therefore, stammeringly, speak his. He listens and is
flattered and thinks he has her mental measure when he has not touched
even the fringe of her consciousness.... Outside the life relationship
men and women can have only conversational, and again conversational,
interchange." ... That's the truth about life. Men and women never meet.
Inside the life relationship you can see them being strangers and
hostile; one or the other or both, completely alone. That was the world.
Social life. In social life no one was alive but the lonely women
keeping up half-admiring half-pitying endless conversations with men,
with one little ironic part of themselves ... until they were fifty and
had done their share of social life. But outside the world--one could be
alive always. Fifty. Thirty more years....
2
When I woke in the night I felt nothing but tiredness and regret for
having promised to go. Now, I never felt so strong and happy. This is
how Mag is feeling. Their kettle is bumping on their spirit lamp too.
She loves the sound just in this way, the Sunday morning sound of the
kettle with the air full of coming bells and the doors opening--I'm
half-dressed, without any effort--and shutting up and down the streets
is _perfect_, again, and again; at seven o'clock in the silence, with
the air coming in from the Squares smelling like the country is bliss.
"You know, little child, you have an extraordinary capacity for
happiness." I suppose I have. Well; I can't help it.... I _am_
frantically frantically happy. I'm up here alone, frantically happy.
Even Mag has to talk to Jan about the happy things. Then they go, a
little. The only thing to do is either to be silent or make cheerful
noises. Bellow. If you do that too much people don't like it. You can
only keep on making cheerful noises if you are quite alone. Perhaps that
is why people in life are always grumbling at 'annoyances' and things;
to hide how happy they are ... "there is a dead level of happiness all
over the world"--hidden. People go on about things because they are
always trying to remember how happy they are. The worse things are the
more despairing they get, because they are so happy. You know what I
mean. It's there--there's nothing else there.... But some people _know_
more about it than others. Intelligent people. I suppose I am
intelligent. I can't _help_ it. I don't want to be different. Yes I
do--oh Lord yes I _do_. Mag knows. But she goes in amongst people and
the complaints and the fuss and takes sides. But they both come out
again; to be by themselves and talk about it all ... they sit down
intelligently to life.... They do things that have nothing to do with
their circumstances. They were always doing things like this all the
year round. Spring and Summer and Autumn and Winter things. They had
done, for years. The kind of things that made independent elderly women,
widows and spinsters who were free to go about, have that look of
intense appreciation ... "a heart at leisure from itself to soothe and
sympathise"; no, that type was always inclined to revel in other
people's troubles. It was something more than that. Never mind. Come on.
Hurry up. _Oh_--for a man, oh for a man _oh_ for a man--_sion_ in the
skies.... Wot a big voice I've got, Mother.
3
"Cooooooo--ooo--er--Bill." The sudden familiar sound came just above her
head. Where was she? _What_ a pity. The boys had wakened her. Then she
had been asleep! It was perfect. The footsteps belonging to the voice
had passed along just above her head; nice boys, they could not help
chi-iking when they saw the sleeping figures, but they did not mean to
disturb. They had wakened her from her first day-time sleep. Asleep! She
had slept in broad sunlight at the foot of the little cliff. Waking in
the day time is _perfect_ happiness. To wake suddenly and fully,
nowhere; in paradise; and then to see sharply with large clear strong
eyes the things you were looking at when you fell asleep. She lay
perfectly still. Perhaps the girls were asleep. Presently they would all
be sitting up again and she would have to begin once more the tiring
effort to be as clever as they were. But it would be a little different
now that they had all lain stretched out at the foot of the cliffs
asleep. She was changed. Something had happened since she had fallen
asleep disappointed in the east-coast sea and the little low cliff,
wondering why she could not see and feel them like the seas and cliffs
of her childhood. She could see and feel them now, as long as no one
spoke and the first part of the morning remained far away. She closed
her eyes and drifted drowsily back to the moment of being awakened by
the sudden cry. In the instant before her mind had slid back and she had
listened to the muffled footsteps thudding along the turf of the low
cliff above her head, waiting angrily and anxiously for further
disturbance, she had been perfectly alive, seeing; perfect things all
round her, no beginning or ending ... there had been moments like that,
years ago, in gardens, by seas and cliffs. Her mind wandered back
amongst these; calling up each one with perfect freshness. They were all
the same. In each one she had felt exactly the same; outside life,
untouched by anything, free. She had thought they belonged to the past,
to childhood and youth. In childhood she had thought each time that the
world had just begun and would always be like that; later on, she now
remembered, she had always thought when such a moment came that it would
be the last and clung to it with wide desperate staring eyes until tears
came and she had turned away from some great open scene with a strong
conscious body flooded suddenly by a strong warm tide to the sad dark
world to live for the rest of her time upon a memory. But the moment she
had just lived was the same, it was exactly the _same_ as the first one
she could remember, the moment of standing, alone, in bright sunlight on
a narrow gravel path in the garden at Babington between two banks of
flowers, the flowers level with her face and large bees swinging slowly
to and fro before her face from bank to bank, many sweet smells coming
from the flowers and amongst them a strange pleasant smell like burnt
paper.... It was the same moment. She saw it now in just the same way;
not remembering going into the garden or any end to being in the bright
sun between the blazing flowers, the two banks linked by the slowly
swinging bees, nothing else in the world, no house behind the little
path, no garden beyond it. Yet she must somehow have got out of the
house and through the shrubbery and along the plain path between the
lawns.
4
All the six years at Babington were the blazing alley of flowers without
beginning or end, no winters, no times of day or changes to be seen.
There were other memories, quarrelling with Harriett in the nursery,
making paper pills, listening to the bells on Sunday afternoon, a bell
and a pomegranate, a bell or a pomegranate round about the hem of
Aaron's robe, the squirting of water into one's aching ear, the taste of
an egg after scarlet fever, the witch in the chimney, cowslip balls, a
lobster walking upstairs on its tail, dancing in a ring with grown-ups,
the smell of steam and soap the warm smell of the bath towel, Martha's
fingers warming one's feet, her lips kissing one's back, something going
to happen to-morrow, crackling green paper clear like glass and a gold
paper fringe in your hand before the cracker went off; an eye blazing
out of the wall at night "Thou God seest me," apple pasties in the
garden; coming up from the mud pies round the summer house to bed, being
hit on the nose by a swing and going indoors screaming at the large
blots of blood on the white pinafore, climbing up the cucumber frame and
falling through the glass at the top, blowing bubbles in the hay-loft
and singing Rosalie the Prairie Flower, and whole pieces of life indoors
and out coming up bit by bit as one thought, but all mixed with sadness
and pain and bothers with people. They did not come first or without
thought. The blazing alley came first without thought or effort of
memory. The flowers all shining separate and distinct and all together,
indistinct in a blaze. She gazed at them ... sweet Williams of many
hues, everlasting flowers gold and yellow and brown and brownish purple,
pinks and petunias and garden daisies white and deep crimson ... then
_memory_ was happiness, one happiness linked to the next.... It was the
same already with Germany ... the sunny happy beautiful things came
first ... in a single glance the whole of the time in Germany was
beautiful, golden happy light, and people happy in the golden light,
garlands of music, and the happy ringing certainty of voices, no matter
what they said, the way the whole of life throbbed with beauty when the
hush of prayers was on the roomful of girls ... the wonderful house,
great dark high wooden doors in the distance thrown silently open, great
silent space of sunlight between them, high windows, alight against the
shadows of rooms; the happy confidence of the open scene.... Germany was
a party, a visit, a gift. It _had_ been, in spite of everything in the
difficult life, what she had dreamed it when she went off; all woods and
forests and music ... happy Hermann and Dorothea happiness in the summer
twilight of German villages. It had become that now. The heart of a
German town was that, making one a little homesick for it.... The
impulse to go and the going had been right. It was part of something ...
with a meaning; perhaps there is happiness only in the things one does
deliberately, without a visible reason; drifting off to Germany, because
it called; coming here to-day ... in freedom. If you are free you are
alive ... nothing that happens in the part of your life that is not
free, the part you do and are paid for, is alive. To-day, because I am
free I am the same person as I was when I was there, but much stronger
and happier because I know it. As long as I can sometimes feel like this
nothing has mattered. Life is a chain of happy moments that cannot die.
"Damn those boys--they woke me up."
"Did they Mag; so they did me; did you dream?"
Perhaps Mag would say something ... but people never seemed to think
anything of "dropping off to sleep."
"I drempt that I dwelt in Marble Halls; you awake von Bohlen?"
"I don't quite know."
"But speaking _tent_atively...."
"A long lean mizzerable tentative----"
"I perceive that you are still asleep. Shall I sing it--"I _durr-e-_empt
I da-_we_-elt in ma-ha-har-ble halls."
"Cooooo--oooo--er Bill." The response sounded faintly from far away on
the cliffs.
"Cooooo--ooo--er Micky" warbled Miriam. "I like that noise. When they
are further off I shall try doing it very loud to get the proper crack."
"I think we'd better leave her here, don't you von Bohlen?"
Was it nearly tea-time? Would either of them soon mention tea? The
beauty of the rocks had faded. Yet, if they ceased being clever and
spoke of the beauty, it would not come back. The weariness of keeping
things up went on. When the gingernuts and lemonade were at last set out
upon the sand, they shamed Miriam with the sense of her long
preoccupation with them. The girls had not thought of them. They never
seemed to flag in their way of talking. Perhaps it was partly their
regular meals. It was dreadful always to be the first one to want
food....
But she was happier down here with them than she would have been alone.
* * * * *
Going alone for a moment in the twilight across the little scrub, as
soon as she had laughed enough over leaving the room in the shelter of a
gorse bush, she recovered the afternoon's happiness. There was a little
fence, bricks were lying scattered about and half-finished houses stood
along the edge of the scrub. But a soft land-breeze was coming across
the common carrying the scent of gorse; the silence of the sea reminded
her of its presence beyond the cliffs; her own gorse-scented breeze, and
silent sea and sunlit cliffs.