The first morning she spent in the place in the wall, writing him a
letter.
"My dear boy," she wrote, "by the time you get this you will be
back in the thick of things. If I have given you anything that
will help you to go on it's all I want. You must just look on
this past month as a holiday snatched from the lap of the gods,
and realize, what you're always telling me, that what one's once
had one has for always. For there can't be any more, and I'm not
even going to write to you. Oh, I feel as though I were failing
you in not writing, but I always meant not to, even when you
were making plans about it. Letters keep up an atmosphere, and
that's better not. Yes, I know what you mean about spiritual
meeting. I'm sort of fused with you as I write. I'm not here--or
even in the future with you--as you read, for I've pulled the
future to me and made it now, now, now, and I'm with you, in the
present, as you read this, and I'm drawing your tired head to
me, and I feel the very way the thick stuff of your coat arches
up under the pressure of my arm. I am you in every bit of me as
I write; not yours, but you. But, for the future, in that way
only. I felt nothing wrong in all I gave you here, because you
needed what I had to give and we were hurting nobody. I'm sure
that's the great thing, to hurt nobody, and that includes you
and even me. It would be hurting both of us if we were to go on
writing because it would keep it all up and we shouldn't be
able to meet again just as friends, and if we make the break we
shall; we are strong--or weak--enough for that. Richard, let
your answer to this be a long one, won't you? Try and tell me
everything I shall want to hear in it because it will be all I
shall have to live on. Dear child, take care of yourself, don't
overwork and don't forget that open windows are the best thing
for that throat of yours. Don't let things at home worry you
more than you can help, and always remember there's no need to
worry about me at all.
"SOPHIA."
* * * * *
During the time that she was waiting for the answer to her letter Sophia
lived at tension, finding relief in the making of her last gift to
him--for she wrote him a poem, and in spite of the deliberate placidity
of the thing it eased the fierce pressure of her thoughts in the way
that only creation can. Sophia was soon to enter on her greatest
strength of feeling. Richard felt more intensely at the time than at
looking back, when his emotions were stale to him, and he marvelled at
the strength they had had; Sophia never knew till the actual hour was
past what the depth of her emotion was. Partly this was that in their
weeks together the need for calm and clarity on her side was so great,
that when with him her being was absorbed in his and so her own feelings
had no room for conscious movement until afterwards. There are times,
when affairs are at the crest, when, by its intensity, sensation seems
numb, but all the while each little thing seen by both inward and
outward vision is registered on the mind with peculiar sharpness of
edge; only to be realized when the wave of incident has passed, and even
then a period of numbness may intervene before realization enters the
soul, deep-driven by the intolerance of memory. Sophia was living in
that tense numbness now, but through it external things made their
potency felt. She grew to know every corner of the little town, and
during the day she would wander several times into the cool dim church,
to breathe the silence and the peace of it. And "Richard . . ." she
prayed, "Richard . . ." She knew of no definite thing to ask for him, she
could not pray he might be free, and happiness was an illusion she had
learned to dread; she could only turn his name over and over in her
mind, lift it up, hold it up and out with all the strength of her will.
Still, in spite of this focusing of her life--a focusing that was to
grow even more passionate in long, hot London months to come--there was
no unity about it, little sights and impulses fraught with value, yet
failed to show any coherent reason; some great cord that could bind
everything together was still not gathered up.
One afternoon she wandered out of the town by the big gates, and turning
to look back at the sweeping wall she saw a narrow path that girdled its
base, rising and falling over the rippling flanks of the hill. As she
looked at it some dim memory stirred in her--she remembered having read
in her childhood that in olden days a man might own as much land as he
could encompass in one walk, returning to his starting-point. The
root-instinct of enclosure was in the idea, and Sophia had a sudden
fancy to make the unconscious town her own by the old method. Without
thinking of much beyond the physical act, she started along the little
track noting idly yet definitely the look of the stones along the
spreading base of the fortifications and the sickles of light made by
the sky's reflection on the curving-over grass blades on the other side
of the path. She went slowly and when she had half-girdled the town she
lay down on a smooth slope, and, locking her hands behind her head,
gazed over the fertile plain. On an almond-tree near a nightingale began
to sing; against the first pink of sunset she saw his little body as a
slightly ruffled blot. She let her mind fill with the song so that it
became the accompaniment to her thought, and slowly the first glimpse of
comprehension began for her.
First she fell to wondering what the plain would look like seen from
above--from the point of view of God. "The human mind, looking from
such a standpoint, would have to concentrate on one thing at a time
if it wanted to attain any idea but a general vagueness," thought
Sophia. "One would have to focus on mountain-ranges, or rivers, or
railway-lines. . . ."
She lay imagining it, seeing how the shining network of railroads formed
a web over the roundness of the world; thinking how it would seem to
this poised mind a mere web and nothing more. A meaningless web; instead
of thousands of roads each leading to a different destination and intent
on its own business. But if the mind, as well as the point of vision,
were that of a god, then each line would be fraught with its
individuality--and not merely because each led somewhere; there was more
to it than that--Sophia struggled towards it. . . . A different time had
seen the making of each railroad, different men worked at the making of
them, men with souls which had thought and felt as they laid the steel
ribbons on which other souls would be rushed along without guessing
anything of the thoughts and feelings. And yet, surely those emotions
could not die. . . . Perhaps, one evening, a workman, straightening his
back and drawing his hand over his wet forehead, had looked towards the
sunset, and in the vague irrational way some scenes are registered on
the mind for always, that aspect of sky and darkening hedge against it
would stay in his memory, oddly mixed with the feel of the wet drops on
his hand and the easing of the muscles across his back, to be recalled
by any similar moment for the rest of his life. If so, how steeped with
humanity those few yards of steel would be! And, apart from the emotions
connected with it by the sense of sight, what an important part the
railroad must play to the men and their wives and children to whom it
meant food and fire! And then, the lines finished, each train going over
them would pile the human associations thicker yet, heaping up all the
feelings, according to their intensity, of the people in the trains. A
god, looking down, instead of merely seeing the network of steel, would
see as well all the human emotions still clinging to the places where
they were lived--a mystical web woven over tangible things, growing
deeper with the years. "Which," said Sophia, the first gleam of personal
light flashing through her, "is why walking round a place makes it yours
if you do it for that. My seeing of this path will be here always, I'm
making a belt of consciousness round the town. It's my city! My city set
upon a hill!"
She scrambled to her feet and for a moment leant her cheek against the
rough stone of the wall, then she went on round the town and in at the
great gate.
That evening she sat in Beata's garden, finishing her poem to Richard.
Elate as she was, she still had no hint of what her discovery meant, or
of how the garden would bring the final revelation to her, but even then
she felt the soothing influence that held it and her as she wrote out
her poem. It went to him without a title, but for herself she headed it: