[_To W.Y. TURNER_]
The sun was streaming through the curtains silhouetting a strange
bloated pattern on the chintz, breaking through an opening and cutting a
deep yellow slit in the carpet. She lay in bed subconsciously awake,
subconsciously asleep, her thoughts drifting into dreams, her limbs
merging into one another. "This is happiness," she murmured to herself,
and feeling consciousness invade her, she clutched at the perfect
moment, and it was gone.
Smiling at her defeat she stretched herself luxuriously like a cat and
poked her toes out into a cool expanse of sheet.
"It is nice," she thought, "to have the whole bed to myself."
She curled herself up and lay for a few moments watching the sun
catching little patches of air and turning them into rainbow dust. Then
she rang. Her maid let in such a flood of light that she was forced to
shade her eyes. An unabashed cuckoo broke into the chorus of birds,
glorying in being a solo part and despising them for mixing and
intertwining their notes.
She got out of bed and her bare feet sank into the warm furry rug;
without putting on her slippers she walked across the room, stepping
like a child into the puddles of sunshine on the carpet. Leaning out of
the window the air pierced through her transparent nightgown--a tingling
quality underlying a faint veil of warmth. Everywhere mist and dew lay
on the countryside like the bloom on a grape. The gardener's boy walking
across the lawn had left his footprints stamped in emerald on the grass.
Smiling intimately to herself she got into her bath, wondering vaguely
at the miracle of water, enjoying impersonally the cool whiteness of her
body, doing tricks of perspective with her arms and legs.
She dressed slowly with indolent rhythmical movements, indifferently
aware of her effortless inevitable perfection.
Even more slowly she walked down the staircase out through the open
window on to the grey terrace. Somehow she felt that she was violating
the morning, forcing the human on to the divine. Sipping the day she
walked towards the almonds with their pink blush of blossom bursting
through the brown; turning round her head she saw the double cherry, its
branches nearly breaking under their load of snow. And at the roots of
every tree uninvited primroses and violets were crowding out the earth.
She followed the winding terraces towards the gleaming river, past
fluttering daffodils and wandering narcissi, over riotous anemones and
bright sturdy scyllæ, shaking showers of diamonds off the grasses as she
went.
The river lay like a long satin streamer, a curling ribbon dropped on
the meadows. And everywhere, hidden and vibrating, was an urgency of
life: buds bursting into blossom, birds bursting into flight.
Gradually the veil was lifting from the morning, the sun was rubbing the
bloom off it as a child rubs sleep from his eyes.
She retraced her steps, putting down her feet with the delicate
fastidiousness of a cat in order not to tread on a flower. "I'm alone
with you," she said shyly and ecstatically to the day. Never before had
she had the Spring to herself. Always there had been the children (now
on a visit) dragging plans and occupations, games, picnics, and bicycles
across the pure joy of living, or her husband like a violin very close
to her ear tearing her nerves to shreds with poignant urgent beauty.
Looking dispassionately at her life, it seemed to her a slum of human
relationships, airless, over-crowded, a dusty arena where psychological
acrobats perform by artificial light. And always that dragging of the
general down to the particular, that circumscribing of everything by the
personal, every rose a token, the moon something to kiss by, flowers
prostituted into bouquets. She thought how happy she was this morning,
feeling a little tiny speck of the miracle of life instead of trying to
catch it like a wasp under the wine glass of some human desire.
This not being a wife, or a mother, or a friend, or a beloved, or even
herself, but a tiny part of the universal, this surely was happiness. To
be at one with the morning, to belong to this frontierless world of
nature, to be coaxed into flower by the sun, to be a strand in some
unknown design, how much better than the weary steering of your life
between the Scylla of your ardent futile longings and the Charybdis of
some senseless malignant providence.
She took her lunch into the wood. The bluebells were still in bud and
hadn't yet swept everything before them in a headlong rush of waves that
never broke. She sat in an open space on a patch of velvety moss,
surrounded by tree trunks and waving windflowers and peeping primroses
and violets, all diffident forerunners of Spring, shyly enjoying the sun
before being submerged in that all-conquering flood of blue.
She caressed the ground with her hand and watched little gusts of wind
play hide and seek with the sun. "I don't believe I've ever been alone
before," she thought, and she stretched out her arms into the air,
initiating them into freedom.
Gradually the sun began to sink, throwing a riotous tangle of crimson
and gold streamers to salute the earth. "They are hauling down the flag
of my perfect day," she thought with a stab of poignant sorrow.
The sky became the colour of a primrose stalk and as transparent as
green glass. Before touching the horizon it dissolved into violet
powder. The colour was being blotted out of everything; one after
another the flowers went out like lights; only the white cherry seemed
phosphorescent in the gathering darkness. A thick white mist was
relentlessly invading everything, climbing higher and higher, enveloping
her in its cold, wet clutches.
Bewildered and miserable, she struggled forward through the extinguished
beauty of the world. A thin white sickle of a moon painted on the sky
looked cynically down at her. Stumbling, shivering, she hurried blindly
along.
The big stone hall was flickering in the blaze of an immense fire,
peopled with strange, unreal, clustering shadows. In front of it stood a
man in a fur coat. He turned towards her with outstretched arms.
"My darling, what have you been doing out without a coat? Look at your
hair all white with mist and your sopping dress. I can't trust you to
look after yourself for one day, can I?"
She looked at him as if he were a ghost. A look of blankness and horror.
He gathered her up and carried her to her bedroom. Putting her in a
chair beside the fire he knelt down and pulled off her shoes and
stockings.
She felt as if something were breaking inside her. Cold unrelieving
tears were running down her face.
He was kissing her hands and her feet, murmuring little caresses,
enveloping her in the glow of his love. And still she couldn't feel any
warmer.
Putting his arms tight round her he held her close to him, her cold wet
face nestling in his neck.
"I shall never leave you alone again," he whispered passionately, but to
his horror he felt her stiffen and fall to the ground with a thud.
At that moment her old maid came in. "Poor wee thing," she said, "don't
you be worrying and fretting yourself. It's just a touch of the Spring."